Investing.com - Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) has racked up impressive gains this year. Before Thursday, shares were up more than 120%. But one Wall Street analyst downgraded AMD Thursday and warned that investors are likely to cash in on the chipmaker's rally in the year ahead.
AMD shares were down more than 4% Thursday afternoon after Northland Capital Markets analyst Gus Richard downgraded Advance Micro Devices to market perform from outperform.
Richard said shares of AMD will likely continue to "melt up" for the rest of the year, but he cautioned against chasing the rally on expectations that profit-taking will occur in the year ahead.
AMD’s big move higher in 2019 has been helped by market-share gains in the PC and server market, particularly at the lower end of the CPU market in the absence of competition from Intel (NASDAQ:INTC).
In 2018, Intel decided to de-prioritize shipments of low-end CPUs after surging activity in its data center-related businesses weighed on its ability to churn out processors.
Intel's CPU shortages are expected to continue into 2020. The company recently conceded that sustained market growth in PCs in 2019 has outpaced its efforts to ramp-up CPU supply.
AMD’s unit share is now about 18% in desktop computers, 15% in notebooks and 5% in servers, Richard estimated, though he cautioned that the chipmaker is unlikely to keep up the pace of market-share gains.
“Due to Intel’s incumbency, share gains will come more slowly in all of these markets the more AMD’s market share expands,” Richard added.
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) shares were up 0.3% Thursday afternoon.