TECH

Intel's Growth Strategy

Witawat (Ed) Wijaranakula, Ph.D.
Sat Nov 22, 2014

At the Intel Annual Investor Meeting this past week, Intel [NASDAQ:INTC] raised the full year 2015 revenue guidance, hiked the dividend and promised Wall Street that its mobile business won’t continue to lose billions, as seen in the past. Let's take a look at a recap of the risks with Intel 's business strategies and propositions.

Intel will be combining its mobile division and its PC division to create a Client Computing Group (CCG). The merger between two divisions will enable Intel to focus on the mobile and PC businesses simultaneously, as well as to hide billions of dollars in losses from the mobile business.

This year, Intel is on track to get its chips into 40 million tablets, mostly by paying the tablet makers to use its chips and take a huge loss. Intel hopes to ship about 70 million tablet chips next year with a smaller loss, assuming some tablet makers start paying for Intel chips, of course.

The end game of Intel’s tablet strategy is to convince some tablet makers to stick with Intel chips and to become paying customers, as more integrated Intel chips for the lower-end tablets become available. At this point, no one knows when that might happen. Currently, Intel has about 19% market share of the tablet market behind Apple. 

About four years ago, Intel established its Intel Custom Foundry (ICF) division within its Technology and Manufacturing Group (TMG) in order to directly compete with pure play foundry companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC). Thus far, Intel’s foundry business, which primarily offers 14-nm Intel manufacturing technology, has only six customers including Altera, Panasonic and other mid-size fabless companies.

Bernstein Research recently suggested that Apple would most likely choose Samsung to manufacturer the chips for its next-generation iPhone, and give the iPad and the low-end iPhone businesses to TSMC. This speculation, if it is true, could put Intel's proposition of becoming a major player in the foundry business at risk.

Intel is doubling down on its smartphone strategies as the company is trying to grow the smartphone business in China, while smartphone shipments have declined year-on-year every month since March. The problem is also that customers, particularly in China, have backed off from 3G smartphones, in favor of 4G businesses as telecom providers have cut subsidies. Intel is still banking on its new SoFIA chipset, manufactured by TSMC using 28 nm-technology, for low-end 3G phones. 

Intel announced that it is paying as much as $1.5 billion to acquire a 20 percent stake in two Chinese mobile fabless chip manufacturers, Spreadtrum Communications and RDA Microelectronics. Both acquisitions are still awaiting regulatory approval. Under the terms of the agreement, Spreadtrum and Intel will jointly develop low-end smartphone chips using Intel Architecture-based system-on-chips (SoCs). The chips, however, will not be available until the second half of next year. 

Ironically, all of the products developed and sold by Spreadtrum so far are ARM-based chips. ARM is an Intel competitor. In an effort to accelerate mobile business growth, Intel has also struck a deal with Chinese chip distributor, Rockchip, to help Intel sell its SoFIA chipset in Asia.

The data center is Intel's next big thing, $14 billion and growing fast. Intel's data center strategy is based on the premise that companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google will continue to build data centers at a rapid rate, fueling demand for Intel’s Xeon processors. This month, Google announced another round of price cutting from 10% to 79% for its cloud computing services. This followed cuts, ranging from 30% to 70%, earlier this year. 

The price of Intel's Xeon chips, which go into the cloud servers, could be under pressure as Intel's customers are dealing with a price war in the cloud computing business. Of course, a rapid build of data centers is not sustainable over the long-term. As the build of data centers slows down, a slow down in demand for Intel's chips will follow. 

Both risk scenarios don't even include an introduction of the Qualcomm ARM-based data center chip by the end of next year or a "black swan" event, such as a burst of the cloud computing bubble.

Disclosure: No position in Intel stock.

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