Chipmaker Intel Corp is cutting its sales forecast for the quarter, adding fresh evidence that a rickety economy is putting a damper on the back-to-school shopping season.
Intel is the world’s biggest provider of microprocessors for PCs and a bellwether for the broader technology industry.
In a statement on Friday, the company said it is seeing “weaker than expected demand for consumer PCs in mature markets,” including the US and Europe.
The warning comes a little more than a month after Intel reported its biggest quarterly profit in a decade. However, those results were fueled by a rebound in technology spending at corporations, many of which held off replacing older computers during the recession. Home compter purchases are another matter. Uncertainty about jobs is still keeping people’s spending in check.
Intel said it now expects revenue of US$10.8 billion to US$11.2 billion for the fiscal third quarter, which ends in next month. That compares with a previous forecast of US$11.2 billion to US$12 billion. On average, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected US$11.5 billion.
Many investors simply did not believe that Intel would be able to hit the higher numbers because of signals from other PC-industry suppliers that sales were collapsing.
Those fears were the main reason why Intel’s stock has fallen about 13 percent since it issued its original guidance on July 13. The fall erased about US$16 billion in shareholder wealth through Thursday’s close.
After the company released its revised outlook, the company’s shares rose US$0.31, or 1.7 percent, to US$18.49 in midday trading on Friday, amid a general lift on Wall Street.
Last week, PC makers Dell Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co also raised red flags about what is normally a robust season for sales.
Dell chief financial officer Brian Gladden said in a conference call that the back-to-school shopping season has been “a little weaker than we would have expected.”
Todd Bradley, head of HP’s PC division, told investors that the company saw some “softness” in the consumer laptop market and that back-to-school shopping started “somewhat late for us.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day