In a big surprise, chip giant Intel announced 25% jump in quarterly revenues, the much better than expected sales figures helped lift profits far ahead of analysts' forecast. Softness in consumer demand for PCs and laptops in North America and Europe were more than offset by strength in its enterprise business, IE servers and continued growth in emerging markets. Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith.
"I think we were just at the early stage of the kind of demand drivers coming out of emerging markets. Say and it’s simple economic cognate. The affordability of technology has come down to the point that you now have a couple of billion consumers that weren’t part of worldwide market a few years ago and today they are."
Intel also was surprised because the chip company didn’t seem to be impacted by supply shortages caused by the disasters in Japan, unlike fellow chipmaker Texas Instruments. Smith says that’s because PC manufacturing is different than other devices.
"The core difference is the PC market is a horizontal market and that means you have multiple suppliers with multiple occasions. It's a very mature supply chain. So their resilience and ability to respond something like this, is pretty high, if you can trust that to say a smartphone or you might have a custom-built materials where one unique product that’s made in an impact area can bring entire product line to its needs."
Meanwhile, Intel’s revenue forecast for the current quarter are also much higher than analysts suggesting talk of the death of PC at the hands of growing popularity of the Apple iPad are overblown.
Conway Kittens, Reuters.
