Intel Admits Losing Market Share to AMD, Vows to "Aggressively Compete"

[Tsing]

Despite being obvious at this point, Intel has confirmed that AMD's recent triumphs with Ryzen have forced it into a tighter corner. Vice president of the Sales and Marketing Group (and director of Microprocessor Marketing and Business Planning) Jason Grebe blamed the turn of the tide on supply issues, which he believes affected both mobile and desktop share.

Intel will apparently "get more aggressive" once that situation resolves to gain back market share. The company also plans to compete with NVIDIA in the GPU business "1.5 years, two years" from now.

In general, if there is a CPU sale happening on the planet, we want to be involved in it. So we don’t look at any segment of the market and say, okay, we are going to walk away from that segment or that we’re not be interested there. We want to aggressively compete in all segments.

As we have gone through the supply issue kind of in the last six to 12 months on the PC side, we had to walk away from some low-end mobile share as well as some channel desktop share. But as we continue to improve our supply situation, we’ll continue to get more aggressive there. – Jason Grebe, Intel.

 

[JosiahBradley]

Will they finally drop prices? Nah.

 

[ThreeDee]

...ok .. what's the accountable version Jason .. ?

 

[Nanobot]

Was there an actual supply issue outside the US for their chips? I only ask because I haven't noticed any retailer in the US state they were out of stock on anything coming from Intel.

 

[s3thra]

Was there an actual supply issue outside the US for their chips? I only ask because I haven't noticed any retailer in the US state they were out of stock on anything coming from Intel.

I'm in Australia and a few months back I ordered 120 Dell PCs for my organisation running i5 8400 chips. Dell told me there might be a delay in delivery, and when I asked why, the CPU shortage excuse was used.

As it turned out, there was no real delay and the machines were delivered within expected time anyway, so I'm not sure if Dell was just using Intel as an excuse to buy some more time if need be.

 

[Brian_B]

Well, losing marketshare is bad news. But it's not the worst news Intel could have.

No, I don't think they will lower prices. The only thing worse than losing marketshare would be lower margins.

I think what we will see is a renewal of the marketing department. Remember the Blue Man Group and "Do do Do!" commercials? A lot of marketing went into Intel's perception as a superior product, and the higher price plays into that same marketing (people often feel that if they pay more for a product it must be of higher quality)

Sure, Intel Engineering has already creamed their pants, but they did that a while ago, and it was no surprise to anyone on the technical side from the moment 10nm started to have issues, that eventually this situation would come to pass.

As long as Intel can still command high margins and move some product, they won't be in serious trouble. They don't need 90%+ marketshare to do that. Their stock price may bump a bit on this news, but the price has already been hammered based on lowered revenue expectations back in April. Official guidance placed most of the downturn on a softening Chinese market...

With respect to the CPU shortage... part of that same April Guidance also blamed lower revenue expectations on a buildup on inventory that occured in the last half of 2018 that was still being worked through by channel partners. Now, that doesn't have to be CPUs, Intel makes a lot of different products... but yeah, it probably was.

 

[Nanobot]

I'm in Australia and a few months back I ordered 120 Dell PCs for my organisation running i5 8400 chips. Dell told me there might be a delay in delivery, and when I asked why, the CPU shortage excuse was used.

As it turned out, there was no real delay and the machines were delivered within expected time anyway, so I'm not sure if Dell was just using Intel as an excuse to buy some more time if need be.

I had a feeling the shortage rationale is being used predominantly to calm investors nerves. Every investment story I've read about Intel uses the mysterious shortage in their stock pricing explanations. As amazing as index funds have been for investor returns, I think investors need to get back to understanding the companies they are investing in because too many of them are not healthy enough to warrant their valuations or investors money.