AMD Creates Joint Venture With China’s Nantong Fujitsu

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“The formation of a joint venture of our back-end manufacturing assets is a significant step towards achieving these goals and strengthening our balance sheet”, Su said. The semiconductor company’s 3QFY15 revenue of $1.06 billion beat the $995.96 million estimate by 6.4%; revenue declined 26% year-over-year (YoY) compared to 3QFY14 revenue of $1.429 billion. “AMD delivered double-digit percentage sequential revenue growth in both of our segments in the third quarter”, said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO.

When excluding the impact of depreciation, taxes and other non-operational expenses, AMD reported a loss of 17 cents per share. In 2014, five of its customers accounted collectively for about 61% of its net revenue, with Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. each generating more than 13% of AMD’s sales, according to a regulatory filing. Overall, AMD’s Computing and Graphics segment saw a 12 percent increase sequentially, but a steep 46 drop year-over-year. AMD blamed lower sales for the drop, as well as an inventory write-down of older devices. NFME will own 85 percent of the joint venture, which will give AMD $371 million in cash and net proceeds of approximately $320 million. Going forward, AMD will be a smaller company, and it will have to rely on outside firms, including this joint venture, to handle assembly and test duties for its chips. About a year earlier the company slashed its workforce by 7 percent.

AMD has recalibrated and restructured during its recent string of losses, but it also has made a point of retaining engineering talent and has rechanneled its efforts and research toward a new set of advanced processors due out in 2017.

But the chipmaker’s instability seems to have also spurred the departure of a few key executives. Then earlier this month CPU brainiac Phil Rogers jumped ship to AMD rival NVIDIA, where he plans to serve as its compute server architect.