Name: Lisa Su Was the Game Changer AMD Needed
Uploaded: 2016-12-21
Duration: 4 min 7 s
Description: The CEO explains how she turned around the company.

Lisa, people are so surprised with what you've done at Advanced Micro Devices. The company is now profitable. After years of losses, revenues are growing at a very fast pace. The stock, this year alone, has doubled, and all this is happening in just the two years since you became CEO. What happened? What changed? You know, I think there is never one thing in magic when you talk about turning around large corporations but I will say for us it is about focus, and focusing on, one choosing the right markets to go after. So There are so many good things to do but we needed to choose the things that we were really good at. It seemed like the turn around came because you backed away from the slow growing PC business, and you focused more on the fast- growing, game technology business, right? It's fair to say, if you looked at our business, you know, three, or four years ago, we had 90 % of our revenue in the PC markets. And the PC market has been volatile over the last few years. You know, my view was, take our great technology, and put it over higher growth segments, like Gaming, like the data center, like high performance graphics. And with that, it also is incredible pride for our engineers to work on the products that are the hottest products out there in the market. Well you've also benefitted from just the popularity of Xbox and Playstation and the fast growth of gaming technology. What's the outlook for the business? How far is this gonna go? You know, it's been an incredible ride. If you look at game consoles this year, Between Microsoft, and Sony, and what they're doing. Not just around gaming, but around virtual reality, and around new gaming technologies. It has been a growing business, and we'll continue to grow over the next few years. You know, we just announced our third quarter earnings, and we grew 23 % year- on- year, which I'm very pleased with. Yeah. Great numbers. Can you count on Microsoft and Sony to keep coming out with these popular game consoles? We really believe that gaming in general is a great business. So Sony and Microsoft are leaders in the marketplace. But we also believe that if you look at PC gaming, And what's happening with new games and virtual reality and new technology that this will be a growth business for the next couple of years. How big are you in virtual reality now and where do you see that going? Yeah, virtual reality, I think, is the biggest thing over the next three to five years when we really think about how do you really Experience of games differently. And think about as just a completely different experience. So it's an immersive experience, it can kind of bring you into a new world. So we love virtual reality, I think we are one of the leaders today. Yeah. We've put some of the first technology that enables you to really bring virtual reality to the every day consumer. Today, there may be a couple million people using virtual reality. We'd like to see that be 100 million over the next 5 years. So what's the next chapter in your game plan for turning around AMD? We love high performance computing, so if you think about data centers and what powers the Cloud, We actually have some new technology that we call our Zen processor. Zen is my favorite code name there. But really it's about putting out new high performance computing technologies that power the next generation data centers. And we think this will be a very high growth area over the next few years. Well, you know it's interesting because AMD Dominated that area of high performance market many years ago. Now you're starting from scratch, and you're going up against Intel, which is a tough competitor. When will we see if your strategy is working or if it's not paying off? You know this is a big bet for the company. We decided that if you want to compete in high performance processors we needed to start from scratch and really do a brand new design. Zen is that design, it's been in the making For the last four years, we are very close to launching it into production. You should see it in the first half of 2017, and I feel really good about it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

The CEO explains how she turned around the company.