7 months ago on 23rd November 2014 I published my big marketing-study in German. As both a fan of AMD as well as a PC-freak I wanted to publish my comprehensive knowledge about computers and about AMDs current situation. And AMDs situation currently is definitely a difficult one.
As AMD is an American company and most of the audience is outside the German-speaking countries, it's really important to present my thoughts also in English. Well, several months later than originally intended by me: Here it is, my “AMD-Marketing-Summary-2014.pdf”.
What does my paper deal with
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First with a comprehensive analysis for each of the 4Ps in marketing & about economic and strategic aspects of the company’s policy in the last couple of years.
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With strategic as well as with operational solution-approaches, what & how AMD could do better.
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A closer look on AMDs corporate responsibility – something very important to me as a “Greenie” as well as for companys in the long term.
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New and not contained in my German paper is a wrap-up of new developments at AMD from December 2014 until today. And there have been made several remarkable changes since then.
What are the most important insights of my study:
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AMDs basic-strategy, breaking out the 2-front-long-time-static-warfare with Intel & Nvidia by seeking for new product-fields basically is a 100% right decision, but AMD has overshot this target.
As a result the company has neglected traditional product-fields, most of all the Opteron & FX-CPU-families too much, which resulted in big economic losses.
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This has to be changed and AMD has set the course for an Opteron & FX rebirth in 2016.
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AMDs products have weaknesses, especially against some Intel CPUs. But they have also their strengths and are still in the 1st half of 2015 rather competitive.
Nevertheless many of them they need to be improved or replaced by successors.
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AMD has significant weaknesses especially in distribution, but also on communication.
Their products quite seldom make it into third-party-manufacturers devices and so didn't sell well – even when they were better suitable for some devices, than competitors products.
Also in communication with stakeholders there have been shortcomings, which in the meantime seem to have been addressed quite well.
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AMDs just introduced R300 graphics-cards offer little improvement over their R200-predecessor an perform reasonable against Nvidia Geforce GTX-900-series as well.
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All we know from the revolutionary ZEN-CPU-architecture looks very promising. If AMD is able to keep their promises, they should do well also against Intel’s Core-i7 & Xeons in late 2016.
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But that’s exactly my main point of criticism:
Letting the Vishera-FX-CPUs silicon unchanged in the markets for 4 years absolutely is a no-go for some reasons:-
Communication-wise: The FX-series is AMDs “top-dog” in the product-range. All products & the whole brand is very much measured by the FXs performance.
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Product-wise: AMD's FX-CPUs top-models in terms of application-performance (but not at games) are competitive with Intel's current Haswell-Core-i5 CPUs.
But with the introduction of the Skylake-generation in autumn 2015 this is going to change. -
Price-wise: After Skylakes launch AMD either will have to accept sales-declines when maintaining the current prices or to accept margin-declines when bringing down prices for maintaining sales-numbers.
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And there are also other reasons like long-term effect for affordable prices with future products or less trust by customers.
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As ZEN-based CPUs are said to arrive in Q4 2016 this is too long for not being competitive against Intel's upcoming Core-i5s. So in my eyes it's an absolute key-products for AMD introducing deeply revised Vishera-FX-CPUs, that I call “Vishera-2.0” and for which I have presented specific measures to stay competitive.
But I will make a separate blog-entry about Vishera-2.0 in the next weeks telling you details.
Final words
AMD is in a really difficult situation right now. But there are also several very promising opportunities. And many products i.e. it's new graphic-cards or it's new notebook APUs (codename “Carrizo”) are competitive.
If AMD sets the right measures I see good opportunities returning to the road of success.
But read all the details in my paper. And I hope, you enjoy my thoughts in this copious summary of my big marketing-study!
P.S.: For everybody interested in more details & understanding German, please see my original documents "AMD-Marketing-Analyse-2014.pdf" and "AMD-Vishera-2.0.pdf"
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