1.16.2007

Intel beats market expectations

Key highlights and comparison to AMD's warning;

  • revenue at $9.7B, net income of $1.5B, operating income of $1.5B
  • 11% increase Q/Q (vs AMD's 3%)
  • ASP significantly up on mobile and servers, along with record shipments overall
  • margins up 49.6% from 49.1 (should be higher because of factory underutilization)

'Congratulations on the market share gains!' - Goldman Sachs

2006 key events:

  • Intel completed the development of its next-generation 45nm process technology which is scheduled for production in the second half of 2007.
  • Intel launched the industry’s first quad-core microprocessors for volume servers and PCs, further extending the performance records established by the Intel® Core™ microarchitecture. Since launch, Intel’s dual- and quad-core processors based on the Intel Core microarchitecture have received more than 50 awards from publications and magazine editors worldwide.
  • Apple* announced a new Apple TV product that uses a low-power Intel processor and chipset to help stream premium music, TV shows, movies and photos from personal computers to widescreen TVs.
  • Intel demonstrated its first mobile WiMAX silicon which is being designed into solutions that will give future laptops and mobile devices broadband access over both WiFi and WiMAX networks, automatically seeking the best available connections.
  • Intel began volume shipments of the industry’s first 65nm NOR flash chips featuring multilevel cell technology that stores two bits of data in each transistor.

Overall 2006 was not a good year compared to 2005 in terms of profits. But it appears that Intel ended 2006 in a better position that AMD. It looks like 2007 will be flat as the competetive environment with AMD will continue. The question is, how much more can AMD take any of this as Intel continues to ramp Core2 and at the same time start 45nm.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like Intel is just selling off its departments just to make a profit. ARM, then Flash. Soon it will be the CPU business which paves the way for my BK prediction.

Deep Thought 86 said...

Intel's Q4 2005 revenue: $10.2B
Intel's Q4 2006 revenue: $9.7B

Intel's Q4 2005 net income: $2.5B
Intel's Q4 2005 net income: $1.5B

Intel's Q4 2005 desktop + server net revenue: $6.4B
Intel's Q4 2006 desktop + server net revenue: $5.1B

Intel's Q4 2005 mobile net revenue: $3.1B
Intel's Q4 2006 mobile net revenue: $3.6B

This is pretty grim news. They're still very profitable in absolute terms, but that's a non-trivial drop in revenue and a huge drop in profits. They might have beat expectations, but that's because expectations were pretty low. I'll have a detailed analysis up soon, just waiting for AMD's numbers. My guess is ATI is killing them and bringing them to overall loss. They're probably also losing momentum but still gaining market share in absolute terms.

This is probbaly AMD's best year in a long while, and Intel's worst.

I wish AMD would break out its numbers according to desktop/server/mobile, but they unfortunately lump everything together