Print this page
Published in PC Hardware

Intel a mess

by on29 April 2022


Financial results show woe, woe and thrice woe 

Intel's PC business fell by 13 per cent something that the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street considered a strong first quarter.

Overall, Intel reported a net income of $8.1 billion, which grew a whopping 141 percent on last year, which is not to be sneezed at. But overall revenue dipped by seven per cent to $18.4 billion and Chipzilla's Client Computing Group (CCG), revenue fell 13 percent to $9.3 billion. CCG is Intel’s largest business segment so this hurt.

Chipzilla's Intel’s Datacenter and AI Group, its second largest business group, saw revenue increase 22 percent to $6 billion. Intel’s Network and Edge Group (NEX) also recorded revenue growth of 23 percent to $2.2 billion, and its other groups all grew, too.

David Zinsner, the Intel chief financial officer who was appointed in January said Intel's PC business, continued to see strong commercial demand, offset by low-end and consumer and education softness and the impact of no longer shipping to customers in Russia and Belarus. 

“Further, component supply constraints continue to be a challenge with the most recent COVID lockdowns in Shanghai further increasing supply-chain risks and contributing to inflationary pressures that are having a negative impact on PC TAM [Total Available Market] for the year. As a result, we’re seeing OEMs continue to lower inventory levels to better match demand and align with other system components. We expect elements of this inventory burn to continue in [the second quarter] subsiding in the second half of the year." Zinsner said.

Kicking Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s chief executive, said that while he believes that the industry is at the “beginning of a long-term growth cycle across semiconductors,” Intel sees some “matched-set” limitations in areas like Ethernet as softening in the consumer PC market. (“Matched set” has become an industry term for the inability to shop a PC with shortages of a critical component to make up a “set” of components, preventing those PCs from being shipped.)

“Chip shortages cost the US economy $240 billion last year, and we expect the industry will continue to see challenges until at least 2024 in areas of foundry capacity and tool availability,” Gelsinger said.

Intel predicted that second-quarter revenues would fall to about $18 billion and that earnings per share would dip from $1.98 to just $0.50, indicating that revenue and profits could fall. The guidance was predicated on the impact of an additional 14th week for the lockdowns in Shanghai. Zinsner said that Intel expects to manage the “inflationary environment” by lowering its own production costs and also raising prices “in certain segments of the business.” He did not say where Intel would raise prices.

Intel said that it has shipped more than 15 million Alder Lake 12th-gen Core processors, with more than 250 designs planned for this year. Intel is shipping samples of Raptor Lake, its next-gen processor, to customers and still plans to follow that with Meteor Lake in 2023, as Intel’s earlier processor roadmap indicated. Intel continues to make “great progress” in its plans to deliver products on five manufacturing nodes in four years, Gelsinger said.

Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and others would use the first Alchemist GPUs it shipped earlier this year, part of the “Arc 3” category. Even more powerful designs with Arc 5 and Arc 7 will ship later this year, Gelsinger said.

Intel shares were up 3.58 per cent on the back of the news, so investors generally thought Intel had a promising future. 

 

Last modified on 29 April 2022
Rate this item
(3 votes)