Back with a bang
These are supposed to be challenging times for Intel; with it having to fend off antitrust scrutiny, a reinvigorated AMD and move into the unfamiliar territory of smartphones, but try telling its customers that.
It was a great Q4 of 2009 for Intel. While this isn't too surprising given what a nightmare Q4 2008 was for everyone, post Lehman, some of these numbers are pretty damn impressive nonetheless.
Intel raked in revenues of $10.6 billion, up 28 percent on a year ago. But due to all the belt tightening of 2009, managed a record gross margin of 65 percent, 12 percentage points better than a year ago, yielding operating income of $2.5 billion and net income of 2.3 billion, which was a massive 875 percent improvement on a year ago and equates to almost two AMD pay-offs.
"Our ability to weather this business cycle demonstrates that microprocessors are indispensable in our modern world. Looking forward, we plan to deliver the benefits of computing to an expanding set of products, markets and customers," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO.
The record margins are especially impressive since most of the growth in the PC market has come from low price consumer notebooks, and especially the Atom powered netbooks. The assumption has been that Intel has been its own worst enemy by driving down the average selling price of CPUs with Atom, but these figures contradict that.
As a technology bellwether, these figures should herald good earnings across the board. People have clearly been buying a lot of processors, which strongly implies they've been buying lots of other technology products too.
