Intel Corp, the world’s largest chipmaker, expects to be more profitable in the coming years as the personal computer market expands as much as 16 percent through 2014, executives said.
Gross margins will be 55 percent to 65 percent, compared with 50 percent to 60 percent in the past decade, chief financial officer Stacy Smith told investors.
The PC business is “still a growth industry,” Intel chief executive officer Paul Otellini said in an earlier presentation at the company’s Santa Clara, California, headquarters.
Intel, whose chips run more than 80 percent of the world’s PCs, will sell more semiconductors for server computers, data centers and mobile phones, and offer new processors for other products including televisions and security systems, Otellini said.
The company’s ability to manufacture more advanced chips cheaply is helping it stay ahead of the competition, he said.
“We’ve set ourselves up for very profitable growth,” Otellini said. “Intel has a unique set of attributes that no one has.”
That will help Intel deliver double-digit revenue and earnings per-share growth in the coming years, he said.
Intel, the world’s largest computer-chip maker, fell US$0.27, or 1.2 percent, to US$22.28 at 4pm New York time in NASDAQ Stock Market trading. The shares have gained 9.2 percent this year.
Intel is “highly confident” in the forecasts it gave for the second quarter, Intel’s head of sales Thomas Kilroy said in a presentation after Otellini.
Some areas are ahead of the company’s internal predictions while some have fallen behind, Kilroy said.
Intel forecast last month that second-quarter sales will climb as high as US$10.6 billion, exceeding analysts’ predictions at that time. Full-year gross margin will widen to a record of about 64 percent, the company said.
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