Nice find. Sort of sounds like 1988 where overall growth seems to be "pretty good" and Barrett is (in Europe) saying no comment on earnings but we are growing sales faster in Asia and pretty fast in Europe.
From usa today
Craig Barrett said Intel's forecast of sales of between $9.2 billion and $9.4 billion for the quarter to the end of March — an increase of some 15% over the year-ago period — showed the company outpacing a flattish broader sector.
"That's our current forecast. So we're seeing reasonable growth year-upon-year to date. Now one quarter doesn't make the whole year, but at least we're not seeing a flat performance to date," Barrett told Reuters in an interview.
Barrett declined to say whether Intel's factory network, the largest in the semiconductor industry, is still struggling to meet demand for its second-generation Centrino chips used in notebook PCs but said that demand is still strong.
"There has been very strong demand for mobile computing — obviously the Pentium M and the Centrino have been very popular in the marketplace — so it's been a challenge to keep up."
"I think the whole marketplace has been a bit surprised by how fast that conversion has gone on," he added, referring to users switching from desktop PCs to notebooks.
"We've looked at acquiring what I would call interesting technology to complement our own — usually a technology acquisition as opposed to a revenue acquisition," said Barrett, who is due to step down as CEO in May.
Barrett, who hands over after seven years as CEO to Paul Otellini in a long-planned change of top management, said he is proud of his 30 years with a company that many had once written off as unable to compete in the global market.
But he regretted not having been able to boost the value of Intel stock, which lost more than a quarter of its value last year and was one of the worst performers in the blue-chip Dow index. "I'd like to see our stock price higher," he said.
Barrett said he could not yet comment on smaller rival AMD's new Turion 64 notebook chip, which AMD said earlier this month it would begin selling to Acer, Fujitsu Siemens and Packard Bell.
"I haven't seen one yet. All I've seen is smoke in the sky above San Francisco," he said, adding that he continued to see AMD as a serious competitor.
Intel recently bought Israeli semiconductor maker Oplus Technologies to bolster its offerings for digital TVs and set-top boxes for an undisclosed sum estimated at $100 million.
Barrett said he is satisfied that Intel had the right strategy to expand its own current cell phone-chip business, after an earlier attempt to enter the market failed because of bad timing and product design problems.
He added that he is aiming for annual sales in triple figures in that business. "To be happy we have to have major design wins and we have to start talking revenues in at least the hundreds of millions of dollars," he said.
Diversification into cell-phone chips is part of a wider push by Intel to move from an identification with PCs into the lucrative consumer electronics market, which Barrett said would have a "material impact" on Intel's sales by 2006.
Barrett declined to say whether he would challenge a monopoly warning by Japan's antitrust regulator, a move Intel can make by Friday at the latest.
But he added: "I don't think we've broken any laws." He said that all options were still open, ranging from court action to complying with an order to scrap certain practices.
The watchdog has said that Intel's Japanese unit squeezed out AMD and Transmeta from the Japanese market by offering rebates to PC makers that agreed to limit or stop purchases of central processing units made by those rivals. |
