Intel Q4 and 2014 Results

By SemiWiki

January 19, 2015

Intel announced their results yesterday for last quarter (and the year). And they were good financially. As Brian Krzanich said:

The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to a great year. We began 2014 expecting roughly flat year-over-year revenue and operating income. Instead the company’s full year revenue grew 6% touching all time record of $55.9 billion. At the same time, operating income rose 25%.

We initially forecasted revenue growth [for the datacenter group] in the low to mid teens with operating profit growing faster than revenue. We exceeded those higher expectations and revenue is up 18%. The operating profit expanded by a remarkable 31%.

They beat Q4 guidance slightly and EPS by quite a lot and margins were up (all good). But Q1 guidance going forward was to lower expectations. In particular they forecast gross margins at around 60% compared to 65.3% this quarter. That is a big drop. Analysts hate this, but I think it is inevitable that as Intel starts to get traction in IoT, tablets and even mobile then margins have to go down from what you can get for top-of-the-line microprocessors for the datacenter business. Stacey, the CFO, said it was connected to 14nm ramp and margins should be up a little later in the year. So 14nm is still a bit behind on yield I’m guessing.

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