Cryptos are gradually beginning to affect the wider economy and the stock market following recent statements by two global giants that as much as 10% of their profits were due to crypto miners.
Nvidia and AMD are two of the biggest GPU producers, both seeing significant demand primarily due to ethereum mining which has at times sent their products out of stock.
That demand now has become a somewhat decent percentage of AMD’s total revenue and profits, with Devinder Kumar, AMD’s CFO, stating on an earnings call:
“Computing and Graphics segment revenue was $1.12 billion, up 95% year-over-year due to strong sales of both Radeon and Ryzen products…
The strength in Radeon products was driven by both gaming and blockchain demand. We believe blockchain was approximately 10% of AMD revenue in Q1 2018.”
They say they expect this to continue, with AMD estimating “blockchain revenue to be mid to high-single-digit percentage of revenue for 2018.”
“In summary, the first quarter was excellent,” Kumar said, with that strong performance giving a stock price jump from $9.70 to a recent high of $11.30.
Another global giant that shares their story, although in a slightly different industry, is South Korea’s Samsung.
They recently moved into bitcoin mining with mass production of asics chips, something which has contributed to a 58 percent year-on-year growth for the first quarter of 2018.
Robert M. Yi, Samsung’s executive vice president of investor relations, stated crypto mining partly contributed to that growth in an earnings call:
“In the semiconductor business, the earning increases significantly year over year thanks to favorable market conditions driven by strong demands in server and graphic card memories as well as earning improvement in both the System LSI and Foundry businesses led by an increasing demand of chips used in flagship smartphones and cryptocurrency mining.”
He did not pinpoint what percentage, presumably because it is too early to state as they have only expanded to crypto mining recently.
But, it is now becoming somewhat clear that the crypto space is gradually integrating with the wider economy and with the wider financial system, so sending Samsung’s price up by around $100.
