To ajbrenner re: Athlon retail assumptions
Here's another take: Best Buy does about $10 billion in annual sales through about 325 stores (and it has a website, but let's eliminate from the analysis). In its 10-K, BB states that about half of the 36% of sales in its home office segment is attributable to PCs; this means about $1.8 billion annually, or about $5.5 million per store ($105K/week). This works out to 130 PCs per week at an ASP of $800, but use your own assumptions. I believe that it's reasonable that 3-5% of all units could be Athlon based (I'm assuming that 20% of all units would be "high-end" machines and that Athlon systems would be 15-25% of the high end). This makes 4-7 Athlon units/week/store. In the beginning, a likely shift to the hottest box could be offset by logistical and availability problems, so you would need to make some assumptions there as well.
This would make the Best Buy sell-through a range of 1300-2200 systems per week. Maybe Best Buy gets 5% of the US retail PC market ($1.8 billion as a percentage of whatever the US retail market is - can anyone help? [I might have this in the office, but it's a Sunday evening and, thank God, I'm not there; my best recollection is that the US retail market was about 24% of 100MM W/W PC units - though that percentage may be off - and at a $1200 ASP last year, would have generated $28B in revenues; $1.8B is just over 6% of $28B, but then, these are rough estimates from a rapidly-failing memory and should not be trusted too much]). This would make Athlon-based systems 26-44K units/week or 338K-572K units/quarter, which is not far from mgmt guidance.
The fact that retail shipments are only commencing the second full week of September doesn't necessarily pull down the AMD numbers, since it can recognize revenues when the parts are shipped to the OEMs. Distribution revenues are generally recognized upon shipment to end-customers, but it would be unlikely that a meaningful percentage of shipments were going into inventory.
As usual, I would be interested in any reasoned comments. - Tad LaFountain
P.S. If anyone cares, my low profile over the past several weeks has been much more attributable to about 25K miles of travel (all business) and a week of vacation since the end of July. I've had occasion to log onto the thread, but darned little opportunity to post. Silence should not be interpreted as lack of enthusiasm for what is taking place! |
