It’s rare to see a Wall Street analyst issue a “double-downgrade” on a stock. It’s even more rare to see a double-downgrade when a company has not whiffed on earnings or issued a severe earnings warning. Just don’t bother telling that to Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD).
HSBC’s Frank Lee issued a double-downgrade to Reduce from Buy, which is HSBC’s equivalent of a “Sell” rating. HSBC’s price target was also slashed to $110 from $200 in the call.
This appears to be the lowest new price target for AMD in well over a year. And HSBC had a high target of $225 last April. So, the firm is now worried that AMD will only be worth half of its expectations less than a year ago.
One worry is that AMD is just not capturing enough of the AI-themed sales like NVIDIA. What really stands out about this downgrade’s impact is that AMD had just bounced big after introducing new AI-related offerings at the Consumer Electronics Show.
AMD shares were trading at $127.33 ahead of the call. This new lower target is actually a forecast of more than 10% implied downside — and AMD’s stock is now down nearly 50% from its 52-week high of $227.30.
The HSBC report is concerned about AMD’s client momentum (using its chips) and also around the core revenues that have not been tied to AI data centers. Two quotes stand out from Frank Lee’s commentary:
We believe AMD wouldn’t be able to penetrate the AI GPU market as much as we had earlier anticipated.
AMD’s share price has corrected by 24% in the past three months, but we believe there remains further downside.
The last big prior AMD downgrade came from BofA Securities. The firm cut is rating to Neutral from Buy and lowered its price objective to $155 from $180 in that call.
The consensus analyst targets for revenues were projecting 13% revenue growth for 2024 to over $25.6 billion, followed by 2025 revenue growth of 26% to $32.4 billion. Now the concerns may focus on how realistic those goals are if AMD is introducing new AI-focused chips and still not getting the sizzle that NVIDIA and Broadcom are getting.
AMD’s stock closed down 4.4% at $121.84. Finviz still has a consensus analyst price target of $181.23. If this call is a preview of other analyst pessimism, then AMD’s consensus price target may be coming down soon.
