Stagnant revenues, falling profits. Both should have been growing geometrically.
Just compare these companies:
Even Qualcomm has seen good growth: https://valustox.com/QCOM
This is how it's done: https://valustox.com/NVDA
EDIT these guys aren't primarily chipmakers, but they're deriving at least a couple of $Bn per year from making good ones: https://valustox.com/AAPL
The US does of course need on-shore chip foundries for strategic reasons.
Pat's biggest real change has been to push the company towards process leadership. They always had good designs, though perhaps also damaged by MBA-think there too.
Still not sure about the decision to get out of non-volatile memory, though perhaps that was just a scope decision. Obviously, you could make a pretty amazing AI device with a whole bunch of NVM in-package...
Intel is a perfect example of why companies need to regularly kill their old selves in order to survive. But it's also a perfect example of why so many companies fail to do so, since it often involves making what appears to be a terrible decision at the time, and convincing a bunch of people who know better to back you up. Very few leaders have the clout to pull this off.
The success of TSCM was the result of an interesting confluence of events: including the existence of ARM; Apple deciding that they were going to design their own hardware and outsource its manufacture; Nvidia developing CUDA; and the machine learning/AI revolution that drove demand for Nvidia cards.
If you take away any of those pieces, I think TSCM doesn't become the powerhouse it is today.
Though I totally agree with the strategic imperative I just wish the rest of us non US countries would wake up to it and stop allowing Western countries to extract economic rent by capturing strategic monopolies on energy, goods and services.
You're living in a bubble if you think the biggest money printer in the world actually cares about the historical performance of your cherry-picked stock comparisons.
Reiterating, the money printer doesn't give a flying fuck about stock price trends.
Why are my stock comparisons cherry-picked? The companies I listed make money from chips. Besides - any investor can compare any two companies for market cap, revenue, and profit, even if one makes chips and the other sells sugary drinks.
The money printer I'm alluding to is the US federal government. They own the proverbial money trees that $8.5B in grants will be plucked from.
The US federal government is also the investor. They couldn't care less that the companies you're attempting to compare against "make money from chips". If the government wants money, they print it, end of story. Furthermore, these irrelevant companies aren't getting $8.5B big bucks for the simple reason that they don't have the independent capacity to make their own semiconductor products...they're fabless design houses, dependent on other companies' infrastructure and processes...more specifically, a certain most excellent company whose bleeding edge infrastructure and processes are physically located at the doorsteps of its greatest economic adversary.
What the US federal government more immediately cares about are sufficiently advanced fab owner operators, more specifically, those rooted deeply in domestic soil...and who better to incentivize than a domestic former alpha dog who ate his own breakfast. Intel isn't leading at the margins anymore, but they're certainly not out of the game.
If you're still not seeing the bigger picture, then I'd recommend reading this recently discussed[1] short story by Arthur C. Clarke to get a relevant feel for the underlying threat landscape.
Native English speaker here, I've never heard this expression before?
I'm not sure how that works with R&D engineering salaries - that might impact their profits even if it's an investment.
I feel like a large technology company should spend a large but consistent amount of money on R&D - I don't like wild swings either way.
I hear what you're saying, but that's also kind of how they got in trouble isn't it? They had an ARM license and a good implementation (at the time) StrongARM, but they shut that down just before smart phones hit. Intel is notorious for shutting down projects like that just before they could have been profitable so they can "focus on their core competencies".
> They need to do some variation of what Elon did to twitter.
Doing to Intel what Elon did to Twitter sounds like a disaster. Yes, Intel needs a shakeup, but don't completely destroy it. It's the largest chipmaker in the US and has actual fabs. I think Gelsinger is on the right track, but it's going to take time.
What nonsense. Since Elon's purge Twitter has had and endless number of persistent issues that frankly are amature hour level bugs.
He filtered developers by demanding they bring a printout of source code and explain it to him, when it's clear if you've ever seen him talk in detail about software he actually understands almost nothing about the process and details of writing code. This is both an ineffective and unfair way of deciding whether or not to fire someone.
He also lost about half of Twitter's advertisers in a matter of weeks.
I believe in fairness and honesty, so I will say Elon is exceptional at selling investors and customers on a technological vision. Saying his mindset and approach would have made Intel far more successful in recent decades is preposterous.
May as well just loot the coffers, pay seven figure bonuses, and then go back cap in hand to the taxpayer.
And we call this “capitalism”.