AMD transformation this year: Pan Xiaoming's hemostasis and rebirth

In fact, Pan Xiaoming, president of AMD Greater China, began a handover with Deng in July 2012. The latter resigned for reasons of personal career development. Deng Yuan Yun did not lead the company out of trouble as expected, at the beginning of 2011, when he took office as president of AMD China, most of the media expected him to replicate the Nokia miracle: in the 5-year period of Deng, the vice-president of Nokia China, the mobile phone company almost monopolized the Chinese market. Pan Xiaoming received but "FireWire mission", headquarters asked him to complete the rapid "stop bleeding." In the first two quarters of 2012, China, which has always excelled, has been "singled out" (less-than-expected) in its earnings. This is an extremely dangerous signal that China, which occupies one-third of the world's business, is considered a "cash cow" for the smooth transition of the entire company's business, and AMD CEO Courville has emphasized this more than once. Pan Xiaoming hands do not have many good cards, China is mainly the traditional PC chip business, and the industry has been declining. "I have to think about how to cut expenditure. "We've readjusted our business positioning and strategy, we've been more focused on execution, and we took the lead to stop the bleeding in the third quarter of the year, and the headquarters thought it was unbelievable," Pan Xiaoming said. "China's business is getting a little bit of energy back, and one obvious change is that headquarters is tilting more resources here." The headquarters of the global desktop business is moved to Beijing, the main chip products will be the first time in the domestic market listing, which is unimaginable before. But for Pan Xiaoming, this may turn out to be a long period of "torment". Because the new AMD business is being redefined--game host chip because China's laws and regulations look difficult to land in a short period of time, a raise in the Chinese area also means he has to bite the bullet to keep the PC business from being swallowed too much by the mobile terminal. Obviously, it's not easy. Stop bleeding in fact, Pan Xiaoming had foreseen all this, and a year ago he had just taken over the Chinese region, this feeling is already obvious. "The market is talking about smartphones, tablets and mobile interconnection, and we're at the top of the industry." It was really comfortable, but this time even we were uncomfortable. "In 2012, AMD's revenues fell 17% from a year ago, with a net loss of 1.18 billion dollars a year, compared with a net profit of 491 million dollars in the previous years." Courville's reforms were not immediate, and the former Lenovo COO the idea of a "pirate culture" internally, designed to awaken the adventurous spirit of AMD employees. He is very determined to lead AMD into the High-growth "blue sea market", such as ultra-low-power servers and embedded semi-customization, to avoid competition with Intel in the PC sector, but this means time. Courville doesn't think the PC will die. "It's going to grow slowly and demand will fall, but it just needs to be there." This is the guy that AMD eats, absolutely can't not. So in the mission Pan Xiaoming received, the main battlefield is stillPC, "We can't change the trend, but we can change our strategy." "Courville once carried out the" Defend + attack "strategy in Lenovo, and he was very clear about what it meant for a company that aspired to change. In the third quarter of 2012, AMD unveiled a round of layoffs involving 14% employees around the world, and Courville started a round of layoffs in November 2011 (10% of Global employees). "We have to speed up our strategic deployment to enable AMD to benefit from change and to pursue a lower-cost business model," he explained. Our reorganization aims to simplify the product development cycle, reduce the break-even point, and enable us to have the funds to support differentiated product roadmap and to seize the strategic opportunities that stand out. By this means, we can probably reduce the cost by 25%. "The first step in ' defending ' is to cut off some redundant units," Pan Xiaoming said. Immediately thereafter, China began to stress execution. This is not really a new topic, because under Deng, executive power is also considered the key to building a strong company. In Deng's words, you can copy my strategy, but you can't copy my executive power. Deng's core idea is empowerment and simplification. He hopes to simplify the original internal organizational structure and process system. He will not only promote change in the Greater China region, but also hope to change the decision-making process of the headquarter to China in part. But the business of Pan Xiaoming on this basis more emphasis on products, "all the main products will be listed in China, I clearly remember the 2006 when our server business, it is code-named ' Barcelona ' products did not unify the launch, AMD caused some impact." "" Look at our current product line, from high-end, midrange to low-end we have competitive products. The previous did not reach the synchronized listing, and now we can do it. This is the ' defend ' that continues to ensure our advantage in the product. "Pan Xiaoming said. Another way to generate revenue is to deepen the channel, three years ago, China began lobbying headquarters to further invest in the domestic four to six market channel construction. "Our channel coverage has reached 50%, which is my commitment to Headquarters," he said. The market is very deep, this piece is done or there is a lot of space. "Pan Xiaoming said. Although the PC industry is in recession, the reality of the Chinese market is that saturation is far below the mature market in Europe and America. There is plenty of market space in the four to six tier market, and OEMs such as Lenovo have begun to Seiko the market. At least for the next year, the goal of Pan Xiaoming is still "flat", which is actually very high, because the industry has been moving down. "He's now putting a big chunk of his energy into several major domestic OEMs, especially Lenovo. He used to be the head of AMD Lenovo, and he knows just how important it is to be able to work with the PC industry's new overlord. Rebirth but Pan Xiaoming also "silently" to prepare for the next step. Won the Microsoft Game Master this MayAfter the order of the Xbox One, AMD has become a chip supplier to the top three game OEMs, and earlier, Sony's play redevelop 4 and Nintendo's Wii U also announced cooperation with AMD. And these three games host this year's sales approximately crazy. Sony said sales in the U.S. and Canada had reached 1 million in the first 24 hours of play redevelop 4, while Xbox one sold 909132 units in the nine-day period of November, and Microsoft said it was the fastest-selling game host in history, The average daily sales of 101000 units. And just in the past Christmas shopping season, Amazon's data show that the peak hours of the two game consoles per minute sales of more than 1000 units. It even turned the AMD into a profit, with its operating profits reaching $78 million trillion in the year's Q3 earnings report in November, while operating losses were $124 million in the same period last year, with $20 million in the previous quarter. However, in 2000, China promulgated the "on the development of electronic game management sites," the views of specific governance, made it clear that "any enterprise, individual may not engage in domestic video game equipment and its 0, accessories production and sales activities." So, Pan Xiaoming's nerves have been strained as the company unveiled a partnership agreement with Microsoft in September. "After the lifting of the Shanghai FTA (some media have said that if foreign companies are willing to register in the Shanghai FTA, they can sell the game host in the domestic market after obtaining permission from the culture-related institution), we have begun to pay close attention to the relevant national policies." "To meet this day, AMD has been in close contact with the gaming industry since the Deng era." Of course, the game is inseparable from the graphics business is the absolute strength of AMD areas, but Courville obviously think more. "Why do we have to win on the game console?" On the one hand, it can indeed increase our market share, but on the other hand, this is a key step in our new Blue ocean strategy. "Pan Xiaoming said. "There are people who say, ' players get the world, ' and a total of four elements associated with the game: Game developers, PCs, clouds and game consoles." Many developers are based on game consoles first and then porting them to PCs. If we win the game host, it will naturally have an impact on the other three elements. "Courville these businesses down to a" semi-customized embedded solution, "simply, AMD and Intel are doing" ready-made garments ", a complete chip solution. And now AMD is tailor-made, "we found that we have very rich intellectual property rights, and combine them to customize a lot of very good solutions." "AMD even thinks the business will account for half of the overall revenue in the future," Pan Xiaoming said, adding that the game's mainframe business, in particular, was 5% to 7% of the total, and that the figure had reached 20% per cent in the third quarter of this year. "But when Courville initially announced thisDecision, not many people in the industry look forward to its future. Intel has never been dismissive of such niche markets because of the fact that embedded revenues are not high compared to traditional chip manufacturing operations, and customization is a thankless business model. The real situation is in the automotive, medical equipment, industry, games and other subdivision areas, the growth is very high. "We're talking about rounding calculations, and you can see that people interact with machines more and more." Many things are through gesture recognition and avatar recognition, which requires our image processing technology, we see a larger market. "Pan Xiaoming said. Under this logic, Courville canceled most of the projects with little input and output, and explicitly opted not to enter the smartphone market. AMD was only tactically following last year's Hyper-war campaign by Intel in the PC industry. "If our CEO is an AMD-trained person, it's hard for him to jump out of the circle, which will give us the market space in the blue Sea," Pan Xiaoming said. AMD is becoming "both ways", and they have even chosen to work with arm to develop Low-power server products. The conventional concept is that it is the rise of arm that has left the market for chip makers such as Intel and AMD based on X86 architectures. Pan Xiaoming began to travel frequently between China and the United States, and the news that Xbox one was likely to enter China also gave headquarters more thought. He put the office of SCBU (semi custom business unit) in Beijing, under his nose. Although the Xbox One has not officially landed in China, Beijing has more than 100 engineers involved in the development of a semi-custom chip for the Xbox, and he is starting to prepare for the second step.