Canaccord Breaks Down The Impact Of AMD's Radeon Exec Jumping Ship To Intel

A high profile name in the semiconductor space earlier this month jumped ship from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD) and joined Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), leaving investors to wonder how big of a hole he left in AMD’s business.

The Analyst

Canaccord Genuity analyst Matthew Ramsay maintains a Buy rating and $20 price target for AMD stock.

The Thesis

AMD’s Radeon Technologies chief architect Raja Koduri, who also previously worked at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), announced Nov. 8 he would be leaving AMD. Within days, Intel announced Koduri would be joining its team as Intel’s new head of graphics.

While investors never like to see an outflow or talent, Ramsay said Thursday that AMD investors shouldn’t sweat Koduri’s departure in the near term.

“With Vega launched (albeit somewhat underwhelmingly) and our belief 7nm Navi GPUs have already taped out, we believe the team and roadmap are in place such that departure of RTG lead Raja Koduri will have minimal near-term impact,” Ramsay said in a note. “However, given NVIDIA’s strength with Pascal/Volta, his departure to Intel leaves much to prove for the growing Radeon brand.”

Ramsay said AMD management was generally upbeat during a meeting earlier this week. Canaccaord anticipates stronger Ryzen sales in coming months and the launch of Ryzen Mobile should reduce potential downside for the stock through the end of the year.

Looking ahead, Ramsay sees 2018 as an inflection point for AMD as Ryzen Mobile and EPYC sales start to ramp.

Price Action

Investors are mostly shrugging off the management shuffle this week. AMD stock is up 2.4 percent on the week, while Intel stock is down 1.2 percent.

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Image credit: Luis Romero, Flickr