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”Innovation requires a social condition we call financial commitment to sustain technological transformation and market access until the generation of a higher-quality, lower-cost product can result in financial returns.[19] The foundation of financial commitment is retained earnings. In the case of Intel, as shown in Table 1 above, in recent years the company has made substantial allocations to P&E and R&D, even as it has distributed almost all its profits to shareholders.[20] But Intel has been able to tap other cash flows to make, simultaneously, large-scale productive investments and shareholder payouts. For the decade, 2011-2020, these other cash flows included depreciation charges of $87b., long-term debt issues of $45b., and stock sales (mainly to employees in stock-based compensation plans) of $12b.
Given the availability of these sources of funds, the vast sums that Intel has wasted on buybacks have not thus far imposed a cash constraint on its investments in semiconductor fabrication. Rather, it has been a deficiency in organizational learning—the essence of the innovation process—that has hampered Intel’s implementation of process technology. The generation of high levels of productivity from P&E and R&D expenditures requires, as a second social condition of innovative enterprise, organizational integration, working in combination with financial commitment. Organizational integration mobilizes the skills and efforts of large numbers of people in a hierarchical and functional division of labor into the collective and cumulative learning processes required to transform technologies to generate a higher-quality product and, then, access markets to attain economies of scale.
The root of Intel’s failure in organizational integration lies in the financialized character of a third social condition of innovative enterprise, strategic control. Accepting stock yield as the measure of enterprise performance, in recent years Intel’s senior executives who exercise strategic control have lacked both the incentive and, increasingly we would argue, the ability, to implement innovative investment strategies through organizational integration.”
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The remainder of the essay discusses legal stock price manipulation via buybacks, how the SEC’s Rule 10b-18 exempts buybacks from being considered illegal stock price manipulation, how hedge funds pressure Intel (and public companies in general) to do this, and the problem of focusing on value extraction instead of innovation. The final two paragraphs contain a prescription for fixing the problem:
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”The 19 publicly listed corporate members of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association that signed a letter to President Biden in February,[25] asking the government for financial support for their industry, did buybacks of $540b. (2020 dollars) from 2001 through 2020, with IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, and TI accounting for 84% of these repurchases. In 2016-2020 alone, these 19 companies squandered $148b. (nominal) on buybacks—almost three times the $50b. in financial aid that the Biden administration has offered the SIA.
Our policy recommendation for the Biden administration is simple: As a condition for giving the U.S. semiconductor industry $50 billion in infrastructure assistance, put a ban on SIA members doing stock buybacks as open-market repurchases. That legislation can then be a first step in Congress rescinding the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 10b-18—corporate America’s license to loot.[26] With a critically important company like Intel focused on innovation rather than financialization, the United States can get back to the business of building a world-class semiconductor-fabrication industry – one that leads rather than lags advances in technology.”