SHOW ME THE MONEY JUST HOW BAD DID IT GET FOR AMD?
All our testing has focused on desktop graphics cards.
It’s well known that AMD struggled in the mid-2010s. But just how bad did the cash crisis get? As the 2000s came to a close, AMD’s business was turning sour. Profits of US$360 million in 2010 and US$491 million in 2011 flipped into a monumental loss of US$1.18 billion in 2012.
In 2013, the bleeding subsided somewhat with a loss of US$83 million, only for the losses to balloon once again to US$403 million in 2014, US$660 million in 2015, and US$497 million in 2016. That’s a total of US$2.8 billion leaving the building over the course of six years. As for how close AMD came to folding, its cash balance of US$1.9 billion at the end of 2011 had shrunk to just US$716 million by mid-2016.
Clearly, that could not continue, which is why many industry analysts were predicting AMD would be bankrupt by 2020. Happily, that never happened and, by the end of 2017, AMD had begun to turn the ship with a small but symbolically important profit of US$43 million. In 2018, AMD had stopped the rot, returning US$337 million. A steady, if unspectacular, result of US$341 followed in 2019.
But it was 2020 that proved AMD had truly entered a new era of high profitability, clocking up US$2.49 billion of net income. The following year was even better at US$3.62 billion, with 2022 looking set to be even stronger, with a US$786 million profit in the first quarter, up a massive 42 percent on the same period in 2021.
If AMD carries on like that, it will breach the US$5 billion profit barrier in 2022. And memories of the flirtation with bankruptcy just a few years ago will have been erased.