Technology

Major Change in AMD Turnaround Sentiment, Intel on Top

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) caught even its less bullish skeptics off guard with its recent poor earnings announcement. The company even severely damaged the enthusiasm of its more bullish supporters, including our own view that AMD’s turnaround this time was very different. While AMD is still likely to have upside again, we can no longer consider AMD among the viable stocks that could double in 2014 — even if we think that AMD’s chance of doubling is a possibility on a longer-term basis beyond just this year.

24/7 Wall St. is showing which analysts made changes to their calls. We did not get to see every single note on the matter, but the reality is that you can see how disappointed the street was with the earnings report contents and in AMD’s guidance.

We have also added in our own color for a longer-term outlook, but we have skipped a recap of AMD’s earnings other than our own earnings report here. We also have simply linked to AMD’s CFO commentary as well. It is impossible to not have Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) covered in here when you view how the Intel earnings reaction was versus the AMD reaction.

As far as our own take, much of the positive development in PCs, servers, gaming consoles, graphic processor units and ultimately in mobile or communications got pushed out from a 2014 story to a later date on the sum of all moving parts of its business. We still like what the company is doing with its cash management and debt maturities (similar to what Sirius XM did). Still, our take is that AMD did reputation damage for turnaround investors in its report. We do not think that this is a fair assessment by any stretch, but it seems like investors betting on a turnaround are now thinking that AMD just cannot seem to shake the woes of yesteryear.

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When we added it to the list of nine stocks that could double, AMD shares were at $3.50. They were at $3.83 as of Friday’s closing bell, after a 16% drop from the $4.57 pre-earnings close — on over 137 million shares! A volume spike of this magnitude (almost 5.5 times normal volume) implies that institutions and investors were exiting on a wholesale basis, and maybe that an already dominant group of short sellers is getting more confident.

Many analysts chimed in on AMD as well. Almost all were negative, as you might imagine. Here were some of the key report summaries we got a chance to review.


Bank of America Merrill Lynch downgraded AMD to Underperform from an already cautious Neutral rating as well, lowering the price target to $4.00 from $4.50. The team here thinks that management has done a good job bolstering its balance sheet and on the design wins for gaming consoles, but that legacy PC and graphics market remains a headwind for AMD. Another negative was in the lack of enterprise wins while Intel is getting that business.

Canaccord Genuity said that its underexposure to enterprise PC upgrades and the crypto-currency collapse yielded disappointing results and guidance, causing the firm to lower the target $4.50 from $5.00.

Credit Suisse did actually raise estimates for 2014, but the firm said structural issues persist at AMD. It showed that AMD’s gaming opportunity is peaking seasonally (which everyone already knew) and showed that AMD’s core PC market effort is being outdone by AMD, ditto on corporate upgrades. AMD’s heterogeneous compute strategy was shown to have unclear performance or cost benefits, and it seems unlikely to transform AMD’s business model.

Sterne Agee maintained a Neutral rating and maintained its $4 price target. It signaled that AMD is attractively valued at 0.5 times sales and had other positives, but also pointed out that AMD PC growth in the coming quarter continues to be a headwind. On diversification of its business: AMD noted non-PC markets such as 1) gaming, 2) dense servers, 3) semi-custom, 4) ultra low-power client and 5) embedded will be about 40% of revenues exiting 2014 and are expected to grow to 50% of revenues exiting 2015.

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S&P Capital IQ downgraded AMD to Hold from Buy and cut its target to $4 from $5 in the call. The report lowered its 2014 operating EPS estimate by $0.05 to $0.16 and keeping 2015 at $0.18 EPS. S&P now thinks that a deeper discount is warranted, given its view of the market share loss to competitors. Despite seeing a good diversification of its revenue base away from PCs is happening, S&P thinks AMD is losing market share in its core microprocessor business amid an improving environment.

Morningstar maintained its Hold rating, but with a $3.50 fair value estimate. Despite the view that AMD is seeing the emergence of its semicustom processor business, it believes AMD will face a constant uphill battle against Intel’s long-term advantages. The other pointed mark was that AMD has shown that it can prevail in a particular processor generation, but it has never been able to maintain its lead in successive generations.

Other analyst calls not shown in full detail were as follows:

  • Deutsche Bank maintained a Hold and dropped its target to $3.50 from $4.
  • FBR Capital Markets downgraded AMD to Market Perform from Outperform, slashing the price target to $4.50 from $6.
  • Goldman Sachs maintained its Sell rating.

We did not see the report from Raymond James, but the firm appears to have maintained its Outperform rating on AMD. At least one firm had something good to say.

The hope was that AMD would be able to shake the old comparisons to Intel, proving that its diversification away from the PC business was taking place. That may still be the case as AMD’s turnaround continues to manifest in 2015, but for now it doesn’t seem like investors are going to bother caring. Rival Intel closed up almost 8% this past week at $33.70, after hitting a decade closing high of $34.65.

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Again, the take of 24/7 Wall St. is that AMD’s turnaround is still happening. The magnitude of that turnaround has moved down and was damaged by the earnings, guidance and commentary from AMD this past week. Any shot of AMD doubling in 2014 from our $3.50 or so call in February likely has now been pushed out further.

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