[ad_1]
Intel comfortably exceeded Wall Street expectations in its last quarter, as continued strong computer sales during the pandemic accounted for most of the ground lost by demand for weaker data centers. figures released last Thursday.
Despite modestly raising their forecasts for the rest of this year, shares of U.S. chip makers fell 3% in post-market operations as Wall Street digested the company’s profit margins. and the increase in capital expenditure as it creates the ground to test a turnaround.
The results are the first of the new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who last month proposed an ambitious plan Intel it is once again at the forefront of chip manufacturing, while at the same time establishing a new strategy to become a “foundry” of chips that performs manufacturing for other companies.
Thursday called for significant early traction in the foundry business, and told analysts more than 50 potential customers had already expressed interest.
However, Intel predicted that its gross profit margin would fall below 55% this year, compared to historical levels of 60%, and indicated that capital spending is likely to reach $ 20 billion. , compared to 14.3 billion last year.
Margins have been affected this year by the increased reliance on lower-margin computers, as well as the costs of increasing process technology by 10 nm coinciding with the start-up costs of the delayed 7 nm technology of the company. The decline in first-quarter margins, which saw pro forma gross profit margin fall more than 6 percentage points, reflected a shift toward less profitable products and increased competition in the data center market, according to Patrick Moorhead , an American analyst chip.
Still, strong first-quarter sales came supply restrictions which have weighed on the entire industry in recent months, as well as the forays its rival AMD has been able to make in the CPU market as a result of Intel’s downturns.
Intel said revenue from its PC division rose 8 percent to $ 10.6 billion, while data center customer revenue fell 20 percent to $ 5.6 billion.
The huge demand for home PCs caused by the closure of offices and schools during the pandemic caused 2021 to be “becoming the largest computer market in history,” with unit sales in some markets up 30% in the first quarter, Gelsinger said. Global PC sales peaked at 350 million in 2012, down from 260 million in 2018, to again exceed 300 million last year.
Some analysts expressed concern over falling data center sales, which had become the company’s main growth driver in recent years. Intel executives said the decline reflected a short-term break in spending by large-scale cloud companies as they “digest” recent chip purchases, and said they expected the business to return to growth as the year progresses.
Excluding $ 1.1 billion in revenue from its Nand memory business, which is in the process of being sold to SK Hynix, Intel reported pro forma revenue of $ 18.6 billion for its last quarter, unchanged from the previous year.
Pro forma profits, before the effect of a $ 2.2 billion charge derived primarily from a recent jury award against the company in a patent lawsuit, reached $ 1.39 per share.
Wall Street was expecting pro forma revenue of $ 17.8 billion and earnings of $ 1.15 per share. Based on formal accounting principles, Intel’s net revenue fell 41% to $ 3.4 billion, with a profit per share of 37% at 82 cents.
[ad_2]
Source link
