There have not been many good news on the product side of Bulldozer, but the latest fiscal report speak of a turning point for the company. It has now made an official statement that 10% of the employees will have to go to optimize the company structure and accelerate growth.
AMD has made it official that around 10% of the employees, globally, will have to go, in what it calls an attempt to improve its competitive power and accelerate growth. In the latest fiscal report AMD was questioned by investers and media what was really wrong with the company when it can’t deliver products in time. Rory Read, the new VP, promised that he had a manic focus on coming to terms with the problem.
If we look back on AMD over the last couple of years not much have gone right, with products that never make it in time or even at all. It can be speculated as to why it chooses to reduce its global workforce by 10%, but according to Rory Read it is good for the company.
“Reducing our cost structure and focusing our global workforce on key growth opportunities will strengthen AMD’s competitiveness and allow us to aggressively pursue a balanced set of strategic activities designed to accelerate future growth,” said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. “The actions we are taking are designed to improve our ability to consistently address the needs of our global customer base and stake leadership positions in lower power, emerging markets and the cloud.”
AMD expects that the restructuring will reslt in around 10 million dollar lower costs for the company in Q4 2011, and 118 million dollar in 2012. The cuts will be done by the end of Q1 2012. It will also make the line of work inside the company more efficient, something AMD believes will help them save an additional 90 million dollar in 2012. In total the restructuring will save over 200 million dollar just in 2012.
AMD will invest this money in improving its strategies for the lower segment, products with low energy consumption, cheap products for third world markets and products for the cloud. All are markets that AMD need to spend more money and resources on, especially develop products with lower energy consumption. The tablet is getting closer to competing with notebooks, but AMD is far behind the competition there and its server processors needs to be updated as well to keep up with Intel.
