Intel Drives Semiconductor Stocks up in Morning Trading

Intel drives semiconductor stocks up in morning trading. Intel rose 6%; AMD rose 4%; Nvidia rose 2%.

Chipmaker Intel Corp on Thursday cut its full-year profit and revenue forecast and warned it would lay off staff, but a stronger-than-expected performance at its personal computers segment helped send shares higher.

Macroeconomic headwinds have muddied the outlook for the PC and data center market, both big markets for Intel.

Intel's "PC Client business was the silver lining as sales grew sequentially giving investors some hope that share loss has moderated materially," said Summit Insights Group analyst Kinngai Chan.

Revenue from the client computing group, which accounts for Intel's PC sales, rose to $8.1 billion in the third quarter from $7.7 billion in the second quarter.

"We believe its data center share loss should also moderate going into next year," said Chan.

On Thursday Amazon reported earnings that missed analyst expectations for revenue at its cloud business, AWS, which rose 28% to $20.5 billion. AWS, and other cloud service providers, are big customers of chip makers, including Intel and key to their revenue growth.

Intel has been losing market share in the data center market and Gelsinger said it lost market share again in the third quarter.

"Our products weren't shipping new products like Sapphire Rapids, but as those are now in full production and we're going to be ramping those aggressively, we're better positioned going forward than we have," he told Reuters, adding that it would take several quarters to ramp up.

But he said Intel gained "meaningful" market share improvement in the PC segment in the third quarter.

Surging inflation has hit demand for computers and other gadgets, forcing electronics companies to cancel orders for components such as chips as they struggle to clear inventory.

PC shipments fell 15.5% in the third quarter, data from Counterpoint Research showed. Intel said it expects 2022 PC market to decline in the mid-to-high teens.

Still, Gelsinger said Intel expected its total addressable market - the market it is pursuing - in 2023 to stand at 270-295 million units.

The company now expects 2022 annual revenue of about $63 billion to $64 billion, compared with $65 billion to $68 billion estimated earlier. Its original forecast was for about $76 billion. Analysts on average expected annual revenue of $65.26 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

Intel trimmed its full-year adjusted earnings per share forecast to $1.95 from $2.30.