Intel Q3 2023 Earnings: Carnage Averted on Strong Performance

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After the decimation that Google faced following weakness in its cloud segment, Intel investors were bracing for a high-stakes earnings report that would set the tone for the next couple of weeks. It seems, however, that carnage has been averted.

Intel has now announced its earnings for the third quarter of 2023, broadly beating consensus expectations regarding its top-line and bottom-line metrics.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) Earnings Release for the Third Quarter of 2023

For the three months that ended on the 30th of September 2023, Intel reported 14.16 billion in non-GAAP revenue, exceeding consensus expectations of $13.50 billion.

Before looking at the actual performance of Intel’s business units during the quarter, here are consensus analyst expectations for some of the company’s key business segments:

Here is the actual performance of Intel’s business segments in Q3 2023

During Q3 2023, IFS recorded the highest growth, while NEX remained the laggard with a growth of -32 percent.

$INTC PC chip unit generated $7.87B in revenue last quarter, consensus $7.4B; Total revenue $14.2B, consensus $13.5B.

— notreload (@thudderwicks) October 26, 2023

The following excerpt from the company’s earnings release provides supplemental platform revenue information:

Finally, Intel earned $0.41 in EPS (non-GAAP), beating consensus expectations of $0.21. Intel had guided to a non-GAAP EPS of $0.20 while announcing its earnings for the second quarter of 2022.

Here is the company’s guidance for the fourth quarter of 2023:

Investors have reacted positively to Intel’s latest earnings release, with the stock currently up around 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Earnings Context

The post-pandemic slump in the global demand for PCs has been dominating Intel’s story for the past couple of quarters. As per the latest estimates from the IDC, global PC shipments in the third quarter of 2023 declined by around 7.6 percent on an annual basis to just 68.2 million units. That said, the situation appeared a bit brighter on a sequential basis where the shipments registered a growth of around 10.7 percent.

Intel has been lagging behind its competitors in the data center sphere where the AI-driven demand for GPUs is off the charts. It does not help, of course, that the chipmaker is predominant in the CPU sphere, which is somewhat of a non-starter when it comes to handling AI-related workloads.

Recently, reports emerged that NVIDIA and AMD were both working on Arm-based CPUs. Should these reports pan out, they would significantly increase the competition for Intel’s predominantly x86 architecture-based CPUs heading into 2025.