Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) (the "Company" or "Seagate") today reported financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended October 2, 2020. "Seagate delivered solid September quarter results supported by strong recovery in the video and image applications market and healthy cloud data center demand, which drove double digit year-over-year revenue growth for our mass capacity storage solutions. We see indications for Enterprise demand to improve and we expect this to continue as the broader markets gradually recover, supporting our positive December quarter outlook and reinforcing our revenue expectations for the fiscal year," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer.

"Demand for data continues to explode, even through this current period of market uncertainty. As a leader in mass data management, Seagate is executing a technology roadmap focused on helping customers put their valuable data to work. We are on track to ship our first HAMR drives for revenue in December, which is an important industry milestone to support the growing need for mass capacity storage. We also have introduced CORTX, an open-source, object-storage software, along with Lyve Rack that together offer enterprises a simple, secure and efficient way to manage massive volumes of data. These developments illustrate our confidence in identifying and capturing future growth opportunities, and we are further underscoring the confidence in our strategy and long-term cash generation abilities with a 3% increase in our quarterly dividend and a $3 billion increase to our existing share repurchase authorization."

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) announced results for its fourth quarter and full year of fiscal 2020, which ended Sept. 3, 2020. "Micron delivered solid fiscal fourth quarter revenue and EPS resulting from strong DRAM sales in cloud, PC and gaming consoles and an extraordinary increase in QLC NAND shipments," said Micron Technology President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. "We look forward to improving market conditions throughout calendar 2021, driven by 5G, cloud and automotive growth, and we are excited by the continued momentum in our product portfolio."

Investments in capital expenditures, net were $2.16 billion for the fourth quarter of 2020 and $7.95 billion for the full year of 2020, which resulted in adjusted free cash flows of $111 million for the fourth quarter of 2020 and $361 million for the full year of 2020. Micron repurchased approximately 824,000 shares of its common stock for $41 million during the fourth quarter of 2020 and 3.6 million shares of its common stock for $176 million during the full year of 2020 and ended the year with cash, marketable investments, and restricted cash of $9.26 billion, for a net cash position of $2.61 billion.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, announces unaudited financial results for the six months ended 30 June 2020 (1H 2020). "2020 has been a year like no other for all of us around the world. Despite the global market uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Razer has had a spectacular start to the year, driven by dominant brand position, user base expansion and stay-at-home trends," said Min-Liang Tan, Co-Founder and CEO of Razer.

"The global "stay-at-home" situation has boosted user engagement with gaming and esports to record levels. With our gamer/ youth-centric ecosystem of hardware, software and services, Razer is well-positioned to capture the opportunities of these secular trends. The fundamentals of our business remain as solid as ever, thanks to our entrenched brand leadership, compelling offerings across hardware, software and services and strong execution. We are confident that these factors, coupled with our strong operating cost discipline and our strong cash position of over US$500 million, put us in good stead, even during times of challenging global economic conditions," he added.

According to the latest DigiTimes Research report, it is said that Korean memory makers have experienced a surge in chip output value. Korean memory manufacturers are Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which both have seen a massive growth of 22.1% on a yearly basis and 13.9% sequentially in the second quarter of 2020. This is no small feat as the demand for memory in the smartphone industry has been slowed in that period due to the COVID pandemic, however, it was offset by strong demand from servers and notebooks. When the output of Korean memory giants is fused, Samsung and SK Hynix had combined revenue of KRW22.9 trillion or about 20.8 billion USD. The demand for memory is expected to continue its growth due to the 5G headset market.

NVIDIA on Wednesday posted its Q2 Fiscal Year 2021 financial results, and the most startling result has been a breakdown of the company's $3.86 billion quarterly revenue among its various businesses. Turns out, that Data Center, and not Gaming, is NVIDIA's largest revenue generator for the quarter. Growing 54 percent over the previous quarter, this division contributed $1.74 billion, as opposed to $1.65 billion from Gaming (up 24 percent QoQ). The Gaming business includes NVIDIA's GeForce line of discrete graphics solutions and the GeForce NOW cloud gaming service.

Much of the growth in revenues for the Data Center business is attributable to the addition of revenues by Mellanox - a network infrastructure company NVIDIA acquired, and adoption of NVIDIA's new A100 Tensor Core GPUs by several new supercomputer projects focused on AI. NVIDIA's scalar processors now power 2/3rds of the supercomputers on the TOP500 list.

Logitech International today announced financial results for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2021. "We delivered an exceptional first quarter and are raising our fiscal year outlook," said Bracken Darrell, Logitech president and chief executive officer. "We grew sales 25% with strong growth in almost every product category. Our company strategy focuses on four long-term trends: more of us will work from home; video calls will replace audio calls; esports will become as big as conventional sports; and billions of people worldwide will create content, not just a handful of TV and movie studios. Logitech's business was already positioned to grow from these long-term trends, and since early March they have accelerated, making Logitech more relevant to customers than ever before."

Logitech raised its Fiscal Year 2021 annual sales outlook from mid single-digit sales growth, to 10 to 13 percent growth in constant currency. The Company also raised its annual outlook for non-GAAP operating income from a range of $380 million to $400 million, to a range of $410 million to $425 million.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today announced results for its third quarter of fiscal 2020, which ended May 28, 2020. "Micron's exceptional execution in the fiscal third quarter drove strong sequential revenue and EPS growth, despite challenges in the macro environment," said Micron Technology President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. "We are ramping the industry's most advanced DRAM technology into production and have delivered more than 75% of our NAND volume as high-value solutions, supported by record SSD revenue in the quarter. Our portfolio momentum positions us exceedingly well to leverage the long-term growth across our end markets."

Lenovo Group today announced robust results for its full fiscal year and Q4, demonstrating the company's position of strength amid unprecedented global transformation. Despite a fiscal year full of macro-economic and industry challenges, the company delivered full-year revenue exceeding US$50 billion (US$50.7 billion) for the second consecutive year. Profitability remained a strength, with historical high pre-tax income of US$1.02 billion, up almost 19% year-on-year. Full-year Net Income was US $665 million, up 12% year-on-year.

Basic earnings per share for the full year were 5.58 US cents or 43.61 HK cents, and for the fourth quarter the figure was 0.36 US cents or 2.80 HK cents. Lenovo's Board of Directors declared a final dividend of 2.77 US cents or 21.50 HK cents per share for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2020.

NVIDIA investors have recently filed a suit against the company, claiming that NVIDIA wrongfully detailed its revenue indicators between departments. The main point of contention here is that investors claim NVIDIA knowingly obfuscated the total value of the crypto market boom (and subsequent bust) from investors, thus painting a picture of the company's outlook than was different from reality (making demand for the Gaming division look higher than it was in reality) and exposing them to a different state of affairs and revenue gains than they expected. The investors say that NVIDIA knew that a not insignificant number of its graphics cards sold between 2017 and 2018 was being bought-up solely for the purpose of crypto mining, and that the company knew this (and even marketed GPUs specifically for that purpose).

The crypto mining boom had miners gobbling up all NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards that they could, with both companies seemingly increasing production to meet the crypto mining bubble demand. However, due to the economics of crypto mining, it was clear that any profits derived from this bubble would ultimately open the door to an explosive logistics problem, as miners offloaded their graphics cards to the second-hand market, which could ultimately harm NVIDIA's financial book. Of course, one can look at NVIDIA's revenue categories at the time to see that crypto would hardly fit neatly into either the Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter, Auto, or OEM & IP divisions.

AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2020 of $1.79 billion, operating income of $177 million, net income of $162 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.14. On a non-GAAP* basis, operating income was $236 million, net income was $222 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.18.

"We executed well in the first quarter, navigating the challenging environment to deliver 40 percent year-over-year revenue growth and significant gross margin expansion driven by our Ryzen and EPYC processors," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "While we expect some uncertainty in the near-term demand environment, our financial foundation is solid and our strong product portfolio positions us well across a diverse set of resilient end markets. We remain focused on strong business execution while ensuring the safety of our employees and supporting our customers, partners and communities. Our strategy and long-term growth plans are unchanged."

Due to the impact of the coronavirus on semiconductor supply and demand, worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to decline 0.9% in 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. This is down from the previous quarter's forecast of 12.5% growth.

"The wide spread of COVID-19 across the world and the resulting strong actions by governments to contain the spread will have a far more severe impact on demand than initially predicted," said Richard Gordon, research practice vice president at Gartner. "This year's forecast could have been worse, but growth in memory could prevent a steep decline."

PC major Dell in its quarterly results call blamed Intel for cuts in its revenue forecast for 2019 (full year) sales. "Intel CPU shortages have worsened qtr-over-qtr, impacting our commercial PC and premium consumer PC Q4 forecasted shipments," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke. Intel's CPU shortages are caused due to demand in the PC and server markets significantly outpacing supply, and not because Intel is supplying below its capacity. The company increased its capex toward manufacturer by $1 billion YoY, retrofitting its manufacturing facilities to make 14 nm processors, all while juggling resources to execute its 10 nm rollout for high-volume mobile and high-margin server processors.

The company hasn't launched 10 nm desktop or HEDT processors, yet, and is reportedly preparing yet another 14 nm line of processors for these platforms, codenamed "Comet Lake." This microarchitecture has also seen a mobile rollout for mainstream mobile form-factors, while Intel focused 10 nm "Ice Lake" for ultraportables and ultra low-power form-factors. Intel executive VP for sales Michelle Johnston Holthaus recently wrote a letter to its customers (primarily companies like Dell,) informing them that despite their best efforts, demand continues to beat supply, and that they hadn't managed to solve their supply issues.

Intel is set to become the world's largest semiconductor supplier of 2019, according to the research from IC Insights. Intel held a crown for the largest semiconductor supplier since 1992, until 2018 when Samsung overtook it because of the booming DRAM business driven by high demand and not enough supply. Being Samsung's main business, any DRAM price/demand fluctuation was having a massive impact on its business. Due to high demand and high pricing, Samsung saw a massive revenue jump which resulted in a new king of the world's largest semiconductor supplier.

However, having seen predictions for a fall of 34% for this year, the decrease in demand will result in lower revenue for all DRAM market suppliers. SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung are expecting their revenues to decline around 29% on a year-over-year basis given the situation. This is resulting in lower revenue for Samsung than Intel has, and makes Intel the king of semiconductors once more. Intel's revenue is expected to reach around 70 billion USD, which is similar to last year's numbers.

TSMC today announced consolidated revenue of NT$293.05 billion, net income of NT$101.07 billion, and diluted earnings per share of NT$3.90 (US$0.62 per ADR unit) for the third quarter ended September 30, 2019.

Year-over-year, third quarter revenue increased 12.6% while net income and diluted EPS both increased 13.5%. Compared to second quarter 2019, third quarter results represented a 21.6% increase in revenue and a 51.4% increase in net income. All figures were prepared in accordance with TIFRS on a consolidated basis.

TSMC today announced its net revenues for September 2019: On a consolidated basis, revenues for September 2019 were approximately NT$102.17 billion, a decrease of 3.7 percent from August 2019 and an increase of 7.6 percent from September 2018. Revenues for January through September 2019 totaled NT$752.75 billion, an increase of 1.5 percent compared to the same period in 2018.

Control is one of the better single player releases of this year already, and has been enough of a success for Remedy and 505 Games to launch a content roadmap stretching all the way to 2020. The game is being served on PC exclusively through the EPIC Games Store, which, besides offering developers higher revenues than Steam, has also launched an all-out campaign to secure high-profile exclusives such as Control and Metro: Exodus (even if some of them are timed exclusives).

Now, an Italian earnings report from 505 games highlights that the developers received a lump, $10.5 million upfront from EPIC; according to the report, "Revenue comes from the computer version of Control (...) The game was released on August 27 but the structure of the marketplace who requested the PC exclusivity has made possible to gain the revenue starting from this quarter." It appears EPIC is offering a safety net for developers in exchange for the exclusivity deals, paying upfront the amount of revenue developers expect to receive from the games' sales throughout the PC platform. In this case, the $10.5 million correspond to a total of 200,000 individual sales of Control. Until that number is achieved, EPIC keeps the full revenue from every sale. Any units sold starting from 200,000, and the revenue is split between the developer and EPIC. It's a win-win, really: EPIC gets more and more traction and publicity on its store, and developers guarantee they get the minimum amount they'd expect to earn by selling the game across the full spectrum of PC marketplaces.

TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today announced its net revenues for August 2019: On a consolidated basis, revenues for August 2019 were approximately NT$106.12 billion, an increase of 25.2 percent from July 2019 and an increase of 16.5 percent from August 2018. Revenues for January through August 2019 totaled NT$650.58 billion, an increase of 0.6 percent compared to the same period in 2018.

AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2019 of $1.27 billion, operating income of $38 million, net income of $16 million and diluted
earnings per share of $0.01. On a non-GAAP(*) basis, operating income was $84 million, net income was $62 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.06.

"We delivered solid first quarter results with significant gross margin expansion as Ryzen and EPYC processor and datacenter GPU revenue more than doubled year-over-year," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We look forward to the upcoming launches of our next-generation 7nm PC, gaming
and datacenter products which we expect to drive further market share gains and financial growth."

Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter 2019 financial results. In the first quarter, the company generated approximately $5.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.4 billion and used $2.5 billion to repurchase 49 million shares of stock.

"Results for the first quarter were slightly higher than our January expectations. We shipped a strong mix of high-performance products and continued spending discipline while ramping 10nm and managing a challenging NAND pricing environment. Looking ahead, we're taking a more cautious view of the year, although we expect market conditions to improve in the second half," said Bob Swan, Intel CEO. "Our team is focused on expanding our market opportunity, accelerating our innovation and improving execution while evolving our culture. We aim to capitalize on key technology inflections that set us up to play a larger role in our customers' success, while improving returns for our owners."

EA stocks today have taken a dive of 12.83% (17% at the worst case scenario, with a slight rebound in the meantime), at the moment of writing, compared to their opening hours. The descent, which represents a dip towards a $80.61 valuation per share compared to the $92.52 at the opening market, followed the release of the company's Q3 FY19 Financial Results, caused by lower than expected sales from Battlefield V and lower than expected revenue from EA's mobile efforts. This is capitalism at its finest - the 7.3 million sales of Battlefield V (an impressive number by any metric) fell close to a cool million short of projected sales by this time, and that is enough for the market to correct their expectations.

EA's mobile business saw a YoY fall of 22%, which did little to assuage investors and provide a positive note for the underperforming Battlefield V. It's interesting to note how interesting the markets can be: on the surprise announcement of the new, Respawn-developed Apex Legends, there was no significant change in EA's stock valuation, despite this launch meaning a new, hopefully rich, revenue source for the publisher. Although considering TechPowerUp's overall sentiment regarding that games' launch (not representative of the entire community), it seems that EA won't be banking much on our users.

TSMC's introduction of its 7 nm fabrication technology has essentially propelled the company to silicon manufacturing heights. Every company - particularly in the mobile space - is after the most minute increase in transistor density and power consumption improvements the latest and greatest can bring. AMD themselves have become a major TSMC partner in pursuit of its newfound competitiveness against Intel, and has apparently leveraged the 7 nm process as a way to keep its high-performance GPU offering minimally competitive with NVIDIA's solution - at a much lesser die area requirement, if the Radeon VII vs RTX 2080 estimates are something to go by.

As a consequence of the market interest for the 7 nm process, it has rapidly become TSMC's biggest revenue generator as soon as 4Q18. The company said that 7 nm already generated 10% of the company's entire 2018 revenue, despite the process only having been ramped up in June of the same year. Other less dense technologies still generate a lot of revenue for the company, and are likely much higher volume. However, TSMC is most likely riding on much increased ASP for 7 nm wafers than for other technologies.

The launch of the new Epic Games store for the PC has created many an aftershock in the gaming industry, including Steam updating their revenue share model, but the games press and media alike were quick to discuss implications more so for the equally new Discord store that understandably is more in line as far as breaking into the market goes, and impact from competition accordingly. In a series of moves that no doubt pleases game developers and publishers alike, Discord announced that they are going to offer a 90/10 revenue distribution with 90% in favor of developers- an increase over the industry leading "up to 88%" from Epic Games until then.

There is a small catch in that Discord is allowing developers to self-publish the games if they so desire, which in turn is how they will get that 90% revenue share, so it remains to be seen how user friendly that process is. Discord in their blog post made a big point about how it does not cost 30% to distribute games in 2018, a move that will no doubt be examined throughout not only the gaming industry but every single online app distribution platform where a 70/30 split is the current industry standard. As long as this move enables the store to break even and churn out a profit, we would like to see more of this happening to where game developers get more money and do not feel compelled to work ridiculously long hours.

GIGABYTE, like most manufacturers of graphics cards, bet hard in the crypto craze to fuel demand for their graphics card solutions - an easy deal, considering the company is an AIB to both AMD and NVIDIA, which means they would cater to all of the cryptocurrency mining market. According to DigiTimes, market watchers are aware of the inventory buildup on GIGABYTE's watch, and cite the recent production issues with NVIDIA's latest RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards as reasons for the company to leave the black and cross the profit threshold towards a loss on the Q4.

GIGABYTE's Q3 was already reported as being a close cut in the earnings department, where the company didn't post losses simply because of non-operating incomes - meaning that inventory sold wasn't enough to offset all costs associated with bringing their products to market.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the third quarter ended Oct. 28, 2018, of $3.18 billion, up 21 percent from $2.64 billion a year earlier, and up 2 percent from $3.12 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.97, up 48 percent from $1.33 a year ago and up 12 percent from $1.76 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.84, up 38 percent from $1.33 a year earlier and down 5 percent from $1.94 in the previous quarter.

"AI is advancing at an incredible pace across the world, driving record revenues for our datacenter platforms," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Our introduction of Turing GPUs is a giant leap for computer graphics and AI, bringing the magic of real-time ray tracing to games and the biggest generational performance improvements we have ever delivered.

Following the release of theQ3 financial results by AMD, the stock market was quick to respond to less-than-expected operating income and market share numbers with a ~9.2% drop in share price before the markets closed. This was then followed by fervent after-hours trading resulting an even bigger drop to a share price of $17.88 at the time of this post, compared to the starting value of $25.04 earlier today. The small hike and drop after-hours also indicates some enterprising parties made use of the lower share values to their profit.

AMD held a teleconference for their investors to go along with the report, and attempted to better explain what was going on. In particular, they attribute the decreased client GPU sales to a big decrease in the blockchain GPU sales market (read GPU mining) relative to the first half of 2018. The lack of competing products to take on NVIDIA Pascal-, and then Turing-based, GPU solutions also does not help. As it stands, AMD shared news that GPUs now contribute to only ~30% of their revenue with the other 70% coming from the Ryzen-based processor division instead. They hinted strongly at new products coming from both segments, including an on-track path for a 7 nm datacenter GPU later this year and new Ryzen+Vega-powered notebooks, but it appears that more needs to be done to appease their investors at this point.