AMD Stock Gets Spooked Amid Low Q3 GPU Sales

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), best known for manufacturing computer graphics processors, have recently released its third-quarter financial reports. The reports reveal a large deficit in expected revenue vs. actual sales revenue of graphics processing units (GPUs). According to MarketWatch, AMD came up short by over $100 million in GPU sales. The second quarter of this year was one of AMD’s best in the past decade in terms of earnings. GPU sales had started to tail off but the company still saw huge profits. The market price at the beginning of June was in the $6 range and topped a twelve year high at $33 in mid-September — making it the highest-earning company of 2018 in the S&P 500, as reported by Seeking Alpha. AMD closed its trading day just under $23, but after-hours trading has brought it down further to the $17.50 range — a staggering 30 percent loss for the day.

What’s the Plan?

AMD has had a good run the past few years, profiting heavily off of the emerging cryptocurrency market by selling GPUs to miners looking to add increased hashing power to their systems. Both AMD and industry peer Nvidia have suffered from the downturn in the cryptocurrency market, producing too much supply to meet a dwindling demand driven by slipping cryptocurrency prices and miners migrating to newer and more efficient Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) mining hardware. Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO, believes the company will see further moves to the downside in Q4 and possibly into next year. Su remains optimistic about GPU sales moving forward, however, due in part to the influx of data storage companies and other companies working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which requires top-of-the-line computing power. Do you think AMD will be able to recover in Q4? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!