AMD believes PC sales decline will end after another tough quarter
People began to buy fewer computers, and manufacturers of chips were undergoing significant losses, but AMD believes that the situation should improve long before the end of the year. “First quarter should be the bottom for us in PCs,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su during a phone call regarding the results of the company for the 4th quarter of 2022.
Su predicts that the PC market will shrink by 10% this year as a whole, to about 260 million units. Earlier, IDC reported that 292.3 million PCs were shipped in 2022. Su said that AMD expects “a softer first half and a stronger second half”.
AMD’s profit fell to $21 million in the last quarter, down 98%, but the company claims that most of this drop was due to the acquisition of Xilinx. Revenues from processors and graphics card chips fell by 51% and 7% in Q4, respectively.
While AMD is waiting for demand restoration, Su says that the company has been “undershipping” processors and GPUs to the market. So now the company focused on meeting demand as soon as possible. “We’ll undership to a lesser extent in Q1,” she says.
Gartner research firm states that the current PC slump “marks the largest quarterly shipment decline since Gartner began tracking the PC market in the mid-1990s.” It wrote that the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, “the anticipation of a global recession,” and the fact that many people already bought a new PC during the pandemic have all tanked demand for new computers.