AMD releases financial results for Q4 and 2019

AMD has released its Q4 and annual 2019 financial results, and it's been a fairly promising year for the firm, even if the financial market wasn't too impressed afterwards. 

Amongst the plethora of figures, we discovered that AMD has achieved record quarterly revenue of $2.13 billion, an impressive 50 percent gain over the previous quarter. It also achieved a 4% increase in revenue in 2019 compared to 2018, coming in at $6.73 billion.

AMD put the huge increase in quarterly revenue down to its Computing and Graphics segment, partially offset by lower revenue in its Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom segments. 

Its operating income was massively higher than a year ago too, with figures of $348 million compared to 2018's $28 million. In a similar vein, net income was $170 million compared to last year's $38 million. 

In Q4, AMD's Computing and Graphics segment revenue was $1.66 billion, up 69 percent year-on-year and 30 percent higher than Q3. This was put down to strong sales of Ryzen processors and Radeon GPUs. 

Despite that success, Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom revenue was only up 7 percent year-on-year to $465 million with revenue down 11 percent from the previous quarter due to lower semi-custom sales. 

Still, it's mostly some fairly positive results for the firm, although AMD was cautious when it came to its expectations for Q1 2020. It expects revenue to be approximately $1.8 billion which would be an increase of 42 percent year-on-year but a decrease of 15 percent compared to the previous quarter. AMD CEO Lisa Su also used this time to note that the firm expects "aggressive resistance" from competitors this year. 

That could be why AMD's stock dropped 4 percent in after hours trading straight after the earnings call, with investors wary of the cautious predictions for the coming quarter. 

Despite that, there's a lot to be positive about here. Besides the strong figures, AMD has also reduced its debt by 50% during 2019, and now has $1.5 billion in net cash which is a huge change for a firm that was $4.5 billion in debt in 2009. 

Su also used the announcement to boast of 2019's achievements and suggest what's to come. She said, "in 2019 we launched our new architecture in GPUs, it’s the RDNA architecture, and that was [in] the Navi-based products. You should expect those will be refreshed in 2020, and we will have our new next-generation RDNA architecture that will be part our 2020 lineup."

More details will be announced at AMD's Investor Day on March 5th. 

AMD is still far from the size of the mighty Intel, but when it comes to being the enthusiast's choice, it's got things neatly covered. We can't see that changing in 2020.