9 American Companies That Are Doomed

#6: Zynga

Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), the premier social network game company, is another name that by all rights should not be on this list. Zynga’s revenue rose from $19.4 million in 2008 to $1.14 billion last year. Zynga spent plenty of money to reach the top position in its industry and last year lost $404 million. Investors were drawn to the company because it had been effectively piggy-backing free and premium games onto the Facebook platform, which currently has nearly one billion members. The success of the model appeared astonishing. In its last reported quarter, Zynga says it had 192 million monthly unique users, up 27% from the same quarter a year before. But, as the total number of virtual games has grown, the cost to maintain a lead has become almost prohibitive. Zynga lost $23 million last quarter on revenue of $332 million. In the same quarter a year ago, Zynga made $1 million on revenue of $279 million. Zynga’s growth rate is no longer impressive. And, the problems it faces apparently will worsen soon. The company recently lowered its outlook to reflect delays in launching new games, a faster decline in existing Web games due in part to a more challenging environment on the Facebook web platform and reduced expectations for Draw Something. This bad news pushed Zynga’s shares to $3, down from a post-IPO high of $15.91.

Zynga’s problems are more complex — and more permanent — than delayed games or lower returns on its Facebook presence. The game market is becoming more fragmented by the day as games migrate from consoles to PCs to tablets and smartphones. Social media is not the only place that game players gather in great numbers. Many of the most downloaded apps at the Apple App store are games. The same is true of the Google app store. Zynga’s insurmountable challenge was summed up by its CEO Mark Pincus on the company’s recent earnings call. He said, “We think social gaming is just starting to grow quickly on mobile and we think it has the potential to be the most important part of the experience on mobile and an even bigger business in the future.” Despite his vision of the future, Zynga’s shares are in the rubble. The reason, GameIndustry International reports, is that “Apple iOS and latterly Android have become the dominant platforms for growth in social gaming (not necessarily for social gaming itself, but all the growth is on mobile, not on the web)…” Zynga has been overwhelmed by hordes of new challengers.

#7: Dell

Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) is being hammered by the smartphone and tablet PC sectors. This is not long after its prospects were damaged by poor management decisions and the rise of Asian manufacturers, which has taken significant market share from the company. Dell was one of the companies that capitalized on the creation of the IBM PC platform. Among the others were Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ), Compaq and Gateway. IBM (NYSE:IBM) exited the business when it sold its PC operations to China-based Lenovo in late 2004. After that, the PC industry went through two sets of transformations. One was consolidation: HP bought Compaq, and Acer bought Gateway. The other was the emergence of large Asian PC businesses — Acer, Asus and Lenovo.

All of these companies, Asian and American, face a substantial challenge today. PCs are viewed as commodities, which has put pressure on prices. Computing has moved quickly to smartphones and tablets. Dell made another substantial mistake. As its share of the global PC market has fallen, it has not aggressively followed the successful model adopted by IBM. IBM built a $100 billion business offering consulting, software, IT support, hardware and financing. It does not rely heavily on a single offering. Dell’s reliance on PC sales has continued to sting, particularly now that the PC era has given way to one dominated by smartphones.

#8: Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices‘s (NYSE:AMD) latest quarterly report shows just how bad off the company is. Year-over-year revenue fell 10% to $1.4 billion. Non-GAAP net income fell from $70 million to $46 million. AMD was Intel‘s (NASDAQ:INTC) most direct competitor five years ago and held about 24% of the server and PC chip market in 2007. Last year, its market share fell to 19%. But that is not AMD’s single greatest problem. The company bought graphic chip maker ATI in 2006 for $5.4 billion. PC makers had begun to add more of these chips to their machines. AMD needed to keep pace with rival Intel and graphic chip maker Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA). The main result of the ATI transaction was that it saddled AMD with an unsustainable debt and did almost nothing to help AMD’s fortunes. AMD had revenue of $6 billion in 2007, while Intel’s was $38.3 billion. Last year, AMD’s revenue rose to only $6.6 billion, while Intel’s soared to $54 billion during the same period.

AMD has had three CEOs in the last five years and struggles to find a strategy for growth. The company’s greatest challenge may lie ahead as much of the personal computing market moves to tablets and smartphones. The chip used in the Apple iPad was designed by Apple and made by Samsung. The Apple iPhone 5 will probably be powered by a quad core processor made by Samsung, the same chip used in the Samsung Galaxy S III. The other primary designers of the current generation of chips are Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and ARM Holdings (NASDAQ:ARMH). AMD’s products are almost nowhere to be found in this latest generation of portable devices.

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#9: Bank of America

Most of the operations that constitute Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) today were created through a series of mergers and buyouts, including the acquisition of FleetBoston in 2003 and credit card giant MBNA in 2005. These and other deals were engineered by Ken Lewis, who became CEO in 2001. By 2007, he had succeeded in making Bank of America the largest bank in the U.S. by deposits. But Lewis became overzealous as he tried to make the bank even larger. As the financial system was heading toward near-collapse, Bank of America bought crippled mortgage bank Countrywide Financial in January 2008 and deeply troubled investment bank Merrill Lynch in September of that year. Bank of America’s financial troubles multiplied so rapidly that it was forced to take much more TARP money than most other large U.S. banks — $45 billion. Lewis’s risk-taking eventually was part of the reason the federal government pressed the bank to add outside directors who had been regulators or heads of successful banks. In June 2009, four new directors were appointed, including a former member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Lewis was out by the end of the year, and Brian Moynihan replaced him.

But Moynihan’s tenure has been even more disastrous than Lewis’s. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) passed Bank of America in assets to become the largest bank in the U.S. Crippling losses caused the company to announce it would cut more than 30,000 jobs. In late 2011, a $50 billion class action suit was filed against Bank of America based on the lack of disclosures made when it bought Merrill Lynch. The company has also been the target of several mortgage fraud suits, and entered into a settlement which cost it and four other large U.S. banks a combined $25 billion. Bank of America still faces legal and balance sheet problems which may force it to raise tens of billions of dollars. This will undermine the share price. The final and most difficult challenge is its exposure to the U.S. real estate market, which is unparalleled among its peers. This, in addition to the unhealed scars from poor management and the global financial collapse, has left Bank of America limping along.

This article originally appeared on 24/7 Wall St. on August 1, 2012.