Gross margins are also affected by amount of products solid vs amount of products manufactured, so total sales also go into that percentage, you are looking at the numbers as an end result which isn't always the best way of looking at things. Uncompetitive products don't gain marketshare, unless people are buying rocks that are marketed as gold, that doesn't work in the market place. Still factor in the stock buy back + write off's, they pretty much broke even or lost only 50 million, then add in what the volume sales were if the economy wasn't bad, well thats somewhere in the neigbhorhood of 4-8 million more chips/cards. Guess what those margins figures aren't too bad.
Why did AMD's GPU ASP's drop vs nV ASP's remained, how did that affect gross margins, why was there a shift in marketshare how did this affect margins, who's driving the market with the price war, did the price war affect margins? Why haven't we seen tangible benefits from the price war when we are looking at the bottom lines of both companies? These seem like simple questions if we only look at the end results, but its much more complicated then what you are suggesting.
Nvidia gaining market share? Yeh, that´s looks good on paper this quarter, but did that mean they sold more cards? No.
Nvidia shipped more cards then ATI in a season of stock readjustment. This is like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo in console wars with messes of shipped vs sold.
As far as I know in Q1 2009 ATI on the opposite of Nvidia stopped almost all production/shipping and managed it stocks.
That resulted on 1M profit of the GPU division with 230M sales. Also reports say ATI is going to duplicate and triplicate production in Q2 and Q3 to readjust production/demand:
According to the paper, AMD ordered less than 2,000 wafers for January and February, but the volume has doubled to 4,000-5,000 units this month. The graphics chip vendor is expected to place orders of 8,000-9,000 wafers with its Taiwan-based contract chipmakers for April, and the volume will climb to 10,000 units in May and June.
http://digitimes.com/news/a20090319PB212.html
Don't make to much party around discrete market share when that market is 50% less then it was a year ago and year on year Intel gained 6% only with crap igp´s, AMD lost 1.5% and Nvidia lost 1.6% on overall market.
We are discussing peanuts on discrete market right now. I only take conclusions about market share on Q2/Q3 or Q4 depending on market conditions. This quarter instead of 1M profit of ATI GPU they could shipping huge amounts of cards, take a loss on finances and market share remains equal.
Also:
In any case, Nvidia's marketshare took a jump in Q1. What it is not telling you is that marketshare growth was mainly due to the company dumping about a million units of 65nm DX9 inventory that it had previously written off.
If you do the math, that is more than enough to make up for the marketshare unit gains. What is a bit more troubling is that the margins for discrete GPU sales were not disclosed. Using the numbers that Nvidia did give out, the totals don't add up unless GPU margins were about half of the overall corporate margins. That is bad. Bad bad bad. Your core business should not be struggling to have double-digit margins.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137261/nvidia-spin-borders-truth
Nvidia is following AMD steps has I said before. Read the signs.... AMD had their best quarter and gained market share in the quarter before enter in loss over and over years ago. And Nvidia shares value are reflecting this right now. Despite market share gains.
The market is reading the signs.... (loss over loss, margins way down, GPU business with margins that no one knows, market share gains dumping 65nm DX_9 gpu's on the market to see if it eats it, massive renaming with uncompetitive products, mobile GPU failure, 55nm GPU's took to long to the market and is already late on 40nm, and so on...)
