Intel fired a pretty hefty 5% of its workforce in 2023. Now reports are coming in that the company is planning yet more layoffs this year.
Bloomberg reports these new cuts could be announced next week. Currently, Intel has around 110,000 employees. The report doesn't quote a specific figure, only saying that Intel plans to "eliminate thousands of jobs".
Still, anything measured in thousands will represent multiple percentage points of the existing workforce. Moreover, this news adds to the broader negative vibe at Intel of late, what with those crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, not to mention Intel's woefully inadequate response to the debacle.
As things stand, Intel still doesn't have a clear idea of all the reasons why those chips are crashing, it isn't recalling them, it hasn't stopped selling them, it won't say if warranties will be extended or how many chips it thinks has been damaged. Nice.
Bloomberg also reports that it expects Intel's revenues for the second quarter of this year to be flat compared with the same period in 2023, with the possibility that the company will begin show some signs of growth in the second half of the year.
Despite all this, Intel's share price actually ticked up following the report in after-hours trading late yesterday, albeit Intel stock is still down about 10% from a week ago or so, down 40% from a year ago and down over 50% from early 2020.
Presumably, the news of layoffs is viewed favorably in the sense that it signals Intel taking action to reduce costs and improve profitability. But it's still pretty hard to see where the positive narrative is with Intel right now.
For clarity, let's recap the current state of play at Intel. For starters, the company has yet to really demonstrate that its chip fabs are back on form despite a grand plan to regain leadership in fab technology over TSMC. Its Intel 7 chips are really 10nm rebranded and even now are looking a bit problematical with these 13th and 14th Gen problems. The Intel 4 node, meanwhile, is only being used in a single small chiplet within the Meteor Lake CPU, the rest of the chip being produced by TSMC.
Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
Oh, and the new Lunar Lake mobile CPU is pretty much pure TSMC with only Intel-made silicon acting as the base tile on which the compute tiles sit atop. Likewise, most reports indicate that Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop processors will largely be made by TSMC, with perhaps a few models contain an Intel chiplet.
At the same time, Intel continues to lose market share to AMD in servers, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips threaten its precarious hold on the laptop market, Intel's efforts to make inroads into the graphics market with Arc have been a flop thus far and, of course, its two most recent generations of desktop CPUs are broken. Yikes.
Anywho, here's hoping Intel can get its house in order and quickly. A healthy Intel producing great chips is what we want for our PCs. It just feels an awfully long way off right now.
