Intel hauled in $20.2 billion in Q4 revenue, up 8% year-over-year (YoY) - a testament to the company's business strategy shift toward high-growth, differentiated product segments.
The company underwent a transformation several years ago when it decided, according to Intel CEO Bob Swan, that it should "take advantage of the data revolution that is reshaping computing." In Q4, over half of Intel's revenue came from its data-centric business segments.
On the flip side of this transformation effort, Intel shed business segments that had become bogged down by fierce competition: It sold its smartphone-modem chip division to Apple for $1 billion in July 2019, its Wind River embedded software unit to TPG for an undisclosed amount in 2018, and the majority of its holdings in security software McAfee, also to TGP, for $3.1 billion in 2017.
The transformation effort saw Intel focus on its "double-digit" growth segments that allow it to differentiate from competitors. Here's how three such business units performed in Q4:
- Data centers reached record revenue of $7.2 billion, up 19% YoY. Intel provides high-performance processors designed to power data centers, as well as its own cloud services for enterprise clients. The segment benefited from Intel's mid-2019 release of its second-generation Xeon Scalable Processors, which targeted what Intel identified as a total available market of $300 billion for data-centric products. The company also acquired Habana Labs for $2 billion in Q4, which should help bolster its AI capabilities for data center applications.
- Mobileye hit a record $240 million in revenue, up 31% YoY. Intel continues to reap the benefits of expanded service segments within its autonomous tech group, which it acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017. The new segments offer data processing within the AV space, and the core EyeQ computer vision and mapping segment grew revenues 41% YoY, benefiting from the still-escalating race for AV deployment.
- The IoT Group (IoTG) brought in $920 million, a 13% annual jump. Swan reported that retail and transportation were IoTG's strengths. The company unveiled its Keem Bay vision processing unit in the quarter, for instance, which could become integral to the deployment of V2X solutions. The unit is focusing on edge processing for IoT technologies, which will help manage the influx of data coming from connected device deployments in the coming years.
Intel seems to be focusing increasingly on enterprise solutions rather than its consumer-facing efforts. Though Intel's PC-centric division accounted for nearly half of its revenue in Q4 at $10 billion, up 2% YoY, the company has indicated that its growth priorities lie elsewhere.
It will likely continue to divert resources away from its consumer-centric positioning, foregoing such initiatives as "Intel Inside" or PC laptop arms races, and instead focus on R&D within B2B segments. Intel is increasingly focused on selling to figures such as CIOs, who have prioritized spending in AI and data analytics, according to the 2019 Gartner CIO Survey, which included 3,000 CIO respondents representing $284 billion in IT spending.
