To set the stage: I’ve heard the recent news about layoffs with Intel. Before that I read from their new CEO “On training, I think it is too late for us”. Lastly there has been some offhand comments (from LTT) that they’re preparing to sell the company.
Yet while I have no doubt that they are behind; their revenue is about 55 billion since 2023, down from the high of 78-80ish Billion during the pandemic, but about the same as the plateau leading up to the pandemic 2015-2019.
Maybe i’m naive about the way businesses work; but if your still profitable, and you know you need to “catch up” why lay off people and close sites? Maybe that works for a consumer goods company; if your overhead is too high and your not making a profit: slim down.
However for a company where RND is really where the value is, like Intel, it just doesn’t seem to make sense; your not going to get better designs and processes by reducing your experienced staff and letting them go work for the competition. Maybe some restructuring, (in the engineering sense not the euphemism for layoffs).
I hope they cling on and make somewhat of a comeback, or carve out a niche market, but I don’t feel sorry for them at all. The are guilty of shade monopolistic tactics.
As a nerdy consumer, I wouldn’t count Intel out. I remember when their Pentium 4’s ran hot and AMD started eating their lunch, then they launched the Core line up and were back on top. They get lazy when they’re not challenged.
That being said, historically, they haven’t done very well pivoting from their main business. Their GPU line up seems kind of ok but them trying to make mobile chips went nowhere.
Companies seem to have realized there’s real benefit to using ARM processors in laptops for the performance and battery life which is a direct threat to intel’s business.
So it’s intel’s ability to create when pressure is applied vs their inability to create products outside of their comfort zone.
I don’t count them out but it’s a steep climb.
I’ve got my eye on their stock just in case this looks like it might turn into something like Apple in the 90s.
It’s going to take a long while for them to come back especially since they plan on laying off a huge amount of their engineers.
From what I’ve heard, the main thing modern Intel really excels at is hardware video encoding.