R.
Krause - May 4, 2000
Event
Summary
April 18, 2000 - Spurred by heavy demand for chips in the first quarter,
chip makers AMD and Intel announced sales and earnings estimates far in
excess of what "Wall Street" had predicted. For Intel, earnings were 88
cents per share, vs. the expected 69 cents per share. But the real surprise
was AMD: analysts expected earnings to be 58 cents per share, the actual
results were $1.15 per share, almost double the estimates.
Closer
inspection reveals that 17 cents of Intel's earnings came from a tax settlement
with the IRS, which means the earnings was more like 71 cents per share.
Still ahead of estimates, but not a barn-burner of a quarter. Then factor
in the "extra" $140M Intel earned from investments (i.e., expected $500M
vs. actual $640M) and a picture of operational weakness starts to appear.
Although Intel is clearly trying to stake out a major portion of the networking
market, the problems for its microprocessor business - its bread and butter
- must be troubling to management.
Market
Impact
About a year ago, maybe two, everyone thought the CPU wars were over,
with Intel the victor. Cyrix was just about dead, and AMD looked like
all it could do was deliver lower-priced Intel-like processors. Although
AMD's revenues are still only a fraction of Intel's ($1.1B vs. $8B for
the quarter), their growth rate is currently greater than Intel's. Intel
and AMD have also been going through rounds of aggressive price cuts,
with the end-users reaping the benefits.
Even
with the price cuts on the Athlon CPU et al., AMD is destroying (in the
good sense) Wall Street's estimates, which would seem to indicate that
their volumes are increasing and their production costs are decreasing.
We expect continued performance (AMD also handily beat street estimates
last quarter) will start to get Intel a little nervous, if they aren't
already. In addition, rumors have surfaced regarding Dell Computer considering
adding AMD chips (most likely Spitfire, a Celeron competitor, refer to
TEC News Analysis "Will Intel Take a Loss on Each CPU, but Make It Up
in Volume?"). If that isn't enough to give Intel CEO Craig Barrett the
heebie-jeebies, then maybe nothing will.
As
we have mentioned in the past, one place where Intel is still the only
game in town is PC servers - they aren't called "Intel-based" for nothing.
When/if AMD gets the "HotRail" chipset working (which will allow AMD's
CPUs to work in a multi-processor environment), Intel will have another
12-24 months of relative peace in that market. (Making a quality multiprocessor
system is naturally more complex than a "uni", and we expect it to take
AMD that long to figure out and fix all the issues / complexities / problems.)
Intel
still owns the corporate desktop, but AMD is making inroads there as well.
Finally:
we believe at least some of the great sales and earnings performance was
due to pent-up demand from the pre-Y2K jitters. Thus, we do not expect
sales to be as robust during the second quarter.
User
Recommendations
As we have said in the past, corporate users generally don't concern themselves
with the brand of CPU powering their machine, except that there has been
(and continues to be) a strong preference for Intel. Although "Intel Inside"
still carries a certain cachet, we wonder how much longer it can maintain
the aura. If Intel continues to commit blunders, the "halo effect" may
wear out.
Users
should review the performance specs of comparable Intel and AMD machines
to determine if there is any difference vis--vis the programs they expect
to run. AMD's performance numbers are generally comparable to Intel's,
and generally at a lower price. However, Intel can probably reduce prices
to a greater degree than AMD, as we believe their manufacturing costs
are lower than AMD's.
IT
professionals concerned about more than price should also review the various
"roadmaps" from each company. Although Merced/Itanium is the next big
thing in the chip world, the alleged backward-incompatibility with x86
code may cause people to reconsider it as their 64-bit upgrade path. With
AMD planning to deliver their backward-compatible "Sledgehammer" processor
soon after Itanium, IT managers may think twice about following Intel
in lockstep.