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Comment by crowcroft | Hacker News Reader

$29b cash and about $50b in debt. They have a valid business still, but I think you're under appreciating how much of a hole they need to dig themselves out of.

Their current foundries can't just make other chips, and they certainly can't make GPUs for AI (TSMC make Intel GPUs). They are making a new foundry in Ohio, but in Intel's current state and comments they've made to the market it's not guaranteed the foundry will be built.

Intel might make it out of the hole, but it's going to get worse before it gets better. At their current trajectory their is not valid reason for the company to have 100,000 employees. I expect the recent layoffs are the first of a few.

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> $29b cash and about $50b in debt.

I know nothing about finance, but I have trouble figuring out how they got themselves into this situation given this https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks :

    As of June 29th, 2024, we were authorized to repurchase up to $110.0 billion, of which $7.24 billion remain available. We have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05 billion since the program began in 1990.

Had they not bought there own shares they would be sitting on $70B cash and no debt.

Ouuuuch. There oughta (still) be a law.

> I have trouble figuring out how they got themselves into this situation

That's easy. This is the thinking process:

By buying shared at that time, we increase the stock price and please Wall Street. I get a bonus. Not investing into R&D might cause some problems in the future, but we are Intel. We are #1. When there is a competition, we will just redirect money to R&D and zoom right past it. Plus I will likely be gone by that time anyway.

Because debt was cheap. Easy to keep it on balance sheet a few % rather than give it to shareholders.

Remember, for the decade before this point INTC was throwing off 20B+ profits every year. They've had a couple of bad results recently, and everyone is ready to throw them off a cliff.

People are, in general, very sensitive to the most recent news when it comes to stocks. They will extrapolate what happened over the last year out into the next decade and say X is dead or X is going to rule the world (Intel, Nvidia respectively).

How often do business reclaim the top spot?

The pessimism is because Intel is behind by tens of billions of dollars, and more importantly, years. Many years. Effecting management change and developing the right workforce with the right expertise is not a given, even if they were previously earning $20B net income per year.

One could easily say this is the business with the highest barriers to entry in the world (hence the highest profit margins and profits in the world).

Yea, Intel is more than 50 years old, they’re a mature player in decline. They look more like IBM than Apple.

Yea, and all that debt did was delay the pain that they are experiencing now, while putting the company in a far worse position to try fix itself.

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