Advanced Micro Devices Inc CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰), who took the helm in 2014, has returned the chipmaker to profitability, taken market share from Intel Corp and banished concerns about the company running out of cash.
More than six years into her tenure, AMD has seen its market value surge to more than US$90 billion from about US$2 billion when Su was named CEO.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled a US$4 billion stock repurchase plan, its first buyback since 2001, highlighting its new financial heft and stability.
Photo: Reuters
Still, Su is not ready to take a victory lap.
“Without a doubt it does not get easier,” Su said in an interview with Bloomberg Technology. “We’re in a very competitive market. We have big ambitions about what we want to be able to do.”
Su’s AMD has gone from a chipmaker offering cheaper alternatives to Intel products to a respected provider of computer processors that wins orders based on superior performance.
Su, the first woman to become CEO of a major chip company, said that her main accomplishment has been earning AMD a reputation for delivering on its promises.
She has won customers’ trust that AMD can consistently supply improving products, she said.
The executive has restored AMD’s reputation and performance at a critical juncture for the industry. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated demand for remote computing through the Internet, and for devices needed to support study and work at home.
All this came during a period when Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, had struggled to improve its manufacturing technology, one of the foundations of its decades-long dominance of the computer industry.
Recent chip shortages, which have hamstrung multiple industries as the world economy comes back to life, are not a disaster — they are just another example of the periodic imbalances between supply and demand in the semiconductor market, Su said.
One silver lining for the chip industry is that it has made customers more open to longer-term commitments.
“Normally everybody sort of plans their worlds separately, and now we’re really having to plan our worlds together,” she said.
She predicts that supply of AMD chips, which are built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), would improve throughout this year.
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