ATI Finances

[Dave Baumann]

http://www2.ccnmatthews.com/scripts/ccn-release.pl?/current/1007001n.html

"ATI reports record revenues of US $572.2 million in Q4"

"As a result, ATI currently expects revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2005 to be in the range of $600 to $640 million."

 

[Mark]

There's a conference call scheduled for later today to discuss these results. Those things usually contain some good info not usually disclosed.

 

[PatrickL]

Merill Lynch downgraded ATYT one week ago. They call themselves experts

It seem that the pci-e turn was a very good choice for ATI, time will tell if they are able to consolid that growth. If R520 next year is launched like R420 was, it could cost them a lot of mindshares.

 

[phenix]

Which company is bigger, NVIDIA or ATI if you compare total assets?

It is written in the report that ATI is worth 1.5 billion $.

 

[Sabastian]

Merill Lynch downgraded ATYT one week ago. They call themselves experts

I bet that analyst is eating crow right now..

It seem that the pci-e turn was a very good choice for ATI, time will tell if they are able to consolid that growth. If R520 next year is launched like R420 was, it could cost them a lot of mindshares.

Yeah the native PCI-E solution looks too have been a major winner with OEMs. Definitely the next high end solution had better come off as the high end part to have else they may begin to loose share but this is sometime off. The R480 will be launched before the end of this year according to rumors. I'm checking out the CC right now ought to be some tid bits in there for us.

 

[Bjorn]

Yeah the native PCI-E solution looks too have been a major winner with OEMs.

I doubt that the 5700 PCX would have been that much more popular if it was a native solution.

 

[Sabastian]

Yeah the native PCI-E solution looks too have been a major winner with OEMs.

I doubt that the 5700 PCX would have been that much more popular if it was a native solution.

The OEM market is not the same as the retail market but the OEM market does take cues from the retail. The R3XX series and R4XX series have relatively good demand in the retail enthusiast segments. The performance disparities between NV based products and ATi products are not as pronounced as they were in the past with enthusiast choosing between two companies with viable solutions. For the OEM market they were interested in the native compliancy to the PCI-E spec. Now maybe ATi did some aggressive marketing much in the same way NV attempted to market PS3 as a check box to OEM customers. I really think that the native implementation of the PCI-E spec put OEM customers at ease more so the AGP bridged product from NV. All else being relatively equal OEMs choose the native solution over an AGP bridged one.

EDIT: Then of course there is always the NV3X debacle riddled with cheating allegations and poor hardware overall etc etc etc.(The actual NV30 core never shipping in volume at all and being extremely late to the market.) Yeah with all that in mind the 5700 didn't really have a chance.

 

[WaltC]

Which company is bigger, NVIDIA or ATI if you compare total assets?

It is written in the report that ATI is worth 1.5 billion $.

I don't think "size" evaluation is really much of a consideration as there are so many ways to measure it. Reminds me of the old saw:

"It's not the size of the boat that counts, it's rather the motion of the ocean that makes the difference"....

Just look at AMD/Intel, for instance, over the last five years. As well, just a couple of years ago nVidia had a much larger graphics marketshare than ATi, driven specifically by 3d gpu development and sales. It just goes to show, imo, that size in current markets is just not as important as competitive product development and execution. In fact, size is really something all successful companies which operate in a competitive environment have to carefully watch so that such companies don't become unmanageable, or lulled to competitive sleep by a false sense of security. Companies are run by imperfect human beings, after all, and their manufacturing decisions are just a reflection of the judgment of those people at any given time.

 

[phenix]

Which company is bigger, NVIDIA or ATI if you compare total assets?

It is written in the report that ATI is worth 1.5 billion $.

I don't think "size" evaluation is really much of a consideration as there are so many ways to measure it. Reminds me of the old saw:

"It's not the size of the boat that counts, it's rather the motion of the ocean that makes the difference"....

Just look at AMD/Intel, for instance, over the last five years. As well, just a couple of years ago nVidia had a much larger graphics marketshare than ATi, driven specifically by 3d gpu development and sales. It just goes to show, imo, that size in current markets is just not as important as competitive product development and execution. In fact, size is really something all successful companies which operate in a competitive environment have to carefully watch so that such companies don't become unmanageable, or lulled to competitive sleep by a false sense of security. Companies are run by imperfect human beings, after all, and their manufacturing decisions are just a reflection of the judgment of those people at any given time.

Yes I know it is not important, just asked out of curiosity. For me ATI has an image of a small and nice company, a heroic competitor of big and nasty NVIDIA. I suspect that this image is caused by their previous market shares in 3D industry, but their assets, number of employees, intellectual properties are more or less comparable. Not like AMD/Intel kind of competition. Am I right?

 

[digitalwanderer]

Yes I know it is not important, just asked out of curiosity. For me ATI has an image of a small and nice company, a heroic competitor of big and nasty NVIDIA. I suspect that this image is caused by their previous market shares in 3D industry, but their assets, number of employees, intellectual properties are more or less comparable. Not like AMD/Intel kind of competition. Am I right?

You're right, they're close. nVidia used to be the big bad, but during the R300/nV30 cycle ATi actually became bigger than nVidia by net worth a few times.

Heck, last I heard ATi was still bigger....but Walt is right that is not the best way to look at their "size".

 

[Doomtrooper]

Size wise in terms of people ATI used to be much bigger: 2,200 employees for ATI and a Market Cap of 4.43B. Nvidia has 1,825 employees (this number has been growing steadily in the last year as it was a little over a 1000 during the FX days, must be hiring like crazy) with a Market Cap of 2.65B.

Market share wise the last time I looked ATI dominated the high end DX9 marketshare(mostly from the R3.XX success), with the midrange being split up almost evenly with Intel, Nvidia and ATI. Low end DX9 was Nvidias baby due to the 5200.
Laptop graphic sales were also a strong seller for ATI, I personally think the big win for ATI this time around was the X-box 2/ Nintendo deal that started the ball rolling.

 

[phenix]

Size wise in terms of people ATI used to be much bigger: 2,200 employees for ATI and a Market Cap of 4.43B. Nvidia has 1,825 employees (this number has been growing steadily in the last year as it was a little over a 1000 during the FX days, must be hiring like crazy) with a Market Cap of 2.65B.

Market share wise the last time I looked ATI dominated the high end DX9 marketshare(mostly from the R3.XX success), with the midrange being split up almost evenly with Intel, Nvidia and ATI. Low end DX9 was Nvidias baby due to the 5200.
Laptop graphic sales were also a strong seller for ATI, I personally think the big win for ATI this time around was the X-box 2/ Nintendo deal that started the ball rolling.

Did Nvidia benefit too much from XBOX1? I think due too limited success of the platform they didn't gain much in terms of profit. I think the success of Xbox-2 depends on how succesful it will be against PS3.

 

[jvd]

Size wise in terms of people ATI used to be much bigger: 2,200 employees for ATI and a Market Cap of 4.43B. Nvidia has 1,825 employees (this number has been growing steadily in the last year as it was a little over a 1000 during the FX days, must be hiring like crazy) with a Market Cap of 2.65B.

Market share wise the last time I looked ATI dominated the high end DX9 marketshare(mostly from the R3.XX success), with the midrange being split up almost evenly with Intel, Nvidia and ATI. Low end DX9 was Nvidias baby due to the 5200.
Laptop graphic sales were also a strong seller for ATI, I personally think the big win for ATI this time around was the X-box 2/ Nintendo deal that started the ball rolling.

Did Nvidia benefit too much from XBOX1? I think due too limited success of the platform they didn't gain much in terms of profit. I think the success of Xbox-2 depends on how succesful it will be against PS3.

IF i recall correctly they gained alot , so much so that they were able to offest the horrible sales of the fx line for the last 2 years with the xbox contract .

I'm pretty sure with ati they get a a fixed fee for each xbox 2 graphics chip made and perhaps some % off game sales (not sure about the game sales )

with nintendo i'm pretty sure it will be the same way.

 

[thegrommit]

I'm pretty sure with ati they get a a fixed fee for each xbox 2 graphics chip made and perhaps some % off game sales (not sure about the game sales )

with nintendo i'm pretty sure it will be the same way.

Haven't had time to listen to todays call, but they mentioned in the soundview call that console revenues made up less than 1% of revenues.

The AP story says:

desktop revenue was up 40 percent, notebook chip revenue was up almost 20 percent, and handset chip revenue more than doubled.

I wonder how the margins compare between those three product lines.

 

[jvd]

If you are talking about ati (which i assume since they had the call )

The nintendo gamecube is winding down . Its not selling for as much as it was and is not selling as many units so i'm sure ati is making less money than before.

The gamecube is sitting at 15-20 million units world wide.

The xbox is sitting around the same.

That means next gen if neither company gains any market share ati is looking around around 40 million graphics chips sold. That is alot of $$$ to be made

 

[PatrickL]

Anyway besides the obvious financial gain with xbox deal, the biggest impact was on game developpers and how they started to build software with nvidia cards in mind.

 

[jvd]

Anyway besides the obvious financial gain with xbox deal, the biggest impact was on game developpers and how they started to build software with nvidia cards in mind.

from the previous generations i think they were already developing with nvidia hardware in mind.

I think what happened is we got stuck on that hardware .

 

[thatdude90210]

I remember for the last quarter, out of the $459 million total revenue that Nvidia had, $85 million was from Xbox. That's a lot to replace when Xbox Next ships.

Btw, obviously Nvidia has not reported the current quarter yet, but going by the latest available numbers, ATI went from $100 million less per quarter than Nvidia to over $100 million more per quarter in a couple of years. Now where is that genius that said Orton was running the company to the ground.

 

[thegrommit]

If you are talking about ati (which i assume since they had the call )

What does the thread title say? What does the thread I linked say?

For those who've actually listened to the call, was any mention made of revenue from the Xbox2 or new Nintendo deal? Given the timescales involved, I doubt they'll have much impact over the next two quarters.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Well my comments were made towards the cash injection into the company for such a deal, for R&D etc... Nvidia got a 200 million dollar cash injection four years ago. I would imagine that ATI at least got that same amount, who knows what the Nintendo deals include. Working closely with M$ doesn't hurt either.