AMD Cuts Its Workforce by 10% to Fund New Strategies

As one of the first big moves after Rory Read assumed the role of AMD president and CEO, the company today announced a restructuring and cost-cutting plan designed to strengthen the company's competitive positioning.

"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 Read. "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 will be cutting its global workforce by approximately 10 percent and terminating existing contractual commitments. AMD expects that the restructuring plan will result operational savings, primarily in operating expense, of approximately $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 and $118 million in 2012. Based on anticipated savings from the restructuring plan, AMD expects fourth quarter 2011 operating expenses will be approximately $610 million.

As a result of implementing efficiencies across the company's operations, AMD expects to save approximately $90 million in 2012 operating expenses in addition to the restructuring plan savings, resulting in more than $200 million of expected combined operational savings in 2012.

AMD says it expects to reinvest a significant portion of the savings to fund initiatives designed to accelerate the company's strategies for lower power, emerging markets, and the cloud.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
  • memadmax
    Thats not good.
    Reply
  • Dekasav
    And here's AMD dropping out of the high-performance race.

    RIP
    Reply
  • Marco925
    memadmaxThats not good.Doesn't necessarily mean that the company is in trouble, restructurings can happen without problems, i think this is a good move, it'll help with the research and development costs to get the extra edge against intel whose budget is a behemoth compared to AMD
    Reply
  • I hope they start with the people who pushed the Faildozer module design.
    Reply
  • borden5
    yes yes fire all dem bulldozer maker
    Reply
  • adjman
    hopefully they didn't cut development on graphics
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    He could take a pay cut to help save money. Not sure $1million a year is needed.
    Reply
  • gmcizzle
    Bulldoze the Bulldozers
    Reply
  • stingstang
    Those cuts aren't going to make him popular within the AMD community.
    Reply
  • BlackHawk91
    I hope these cuts don't affect the next Radeon GPUs.
    Reply