Intel has published its financial results for the first quarter of 2008 which ended March 29th. The below figures are in billions of dollars.
The decrease compared to last quarter can be easily explained by seasonal factors as end of the year sales are generally excellent. Unsurprisingly, the figures are due to sales of lower volumes as average prices have remained stable. Compared to the same period last year, the company even did 9% better.
In terms of profits, the 12% decrease may seem surprising because gross profits were good at 53.8% and operating profits increased 23% over the same period last year. Intel attributes this to an exceptional restructuring costing $329 million and related to the creation of Numonyx, the flash branch that was created with STMicroelectronics and Francisco Partners. However, there were especially tax provisions that more than tripled attaining $728.
Note that the geographical distribution of sales was very stable. The Asia-Pacific zone represented 50% of revenue, North America 21%, Europe 19% and Japan 10%. One interesting detail was that while CPU sales in the desktop and mobile segments rose, those of chipsets in the mobile segment followed the same trend while sales on the desktop in this area decreased. Given that AMD and VIA are now out of the game (or almost) for this type of product, we can see that competition from Nvidia is starting to have an impact.
