NEW YORK (AP) — Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, said Tuesday that the weak global economy is slowing its growth, and revenue for the current quarter is likely to come in below Wall Street forecasts.
Intel's second-quarter net income was $2.83 billion, or 54 cents per share. That was down 4.3 percent from $2.95 billion, or 54 cents per share, a year earlier, as operating expenses rose faster than revenue. Intel has been buying back shares, accounting for the flat earnings per share.
Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting earnings of 52 cents per share for the latest quarter.
Revenue rose 3.6 percent to $13.5 billion. Analysts were expecting $13.54 billion.
The Santa Clara, Calif., company says it expects $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, with a midpoint of $14.3 billion, below the analyst forecast of $14.6 billion.
"As we enter the third quarter, our growth will be slower than we anticipated due to a more challenging macroeconomic environment," CEO Paul Otellini said in a statement.

Intel’s first-quarter net income fell 25 percent to $2.05 billion, or 40 cents a share, from $2.74 billion, or 53 cents, in the same quarter a year earlier. Sales fell 2.5 percent to $12.6 billion, Intel said in the statement. Analysts (INTC) on average had estimated earnings of 41 cents a share on sales of $12.6 billion.

The company’s PC business had $7.99 billion in sales in the first quarter, down 6 percent from a year earlier. Its data- center group recorded revenue of $2.59 billion, up 7.5 percent from the same quarter in 2012.

Sales in the current period will be $12.9 billion, plus or minus $500 million, the company said. The midpoint of that range would be an increase of about 3 percent from the first three months of the year, which is “slightly higher than the average seasonal increase,” Intel said in a separate statement.

“It wasn’t as bad as feared,” said Doug Freedman, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets

our growth will be slower than we anticipated due to a more challenging macroeconomic environment

Our Technology and Manufacturing Group once again delivered fantastic results. Our 22-nanometer process health is ahead of where a 32-nanometers was at the same point in its ramp, and ahead of our own plans. That enabled us to ramp Ivy Bridge to nearly a quarter of our PC volume, our fastest ramp ever.

High-performance computing continues to be one of the fastest growing segments within our data center business. And earlier this quarter, we announced more technical details behind our new Many Integrated Core Co-Processor due out later this year. ...... We already have more than 40 customers lined up to support the architecture.

In the smartphone space, we saw the launch of Medfield-based phones from Lenovo, Lava and Orange to great reviews. These launches further established Intel in the market building on the wide presence we have in baseband.

As expected, the fast ramp of Ivy Bridge resulted in a cost increase in the second quarter. We expect that the second quarter was the peak in terms of platform unit costs with cost coming down in the third quarter and more in the fourth quarter.

Inventory grew by approximately $400 million. More than all of the increase in inventories came from the Ivy Bridge ramp, but then offset as we reduced inventory levels of older generation products.

[17-Jan-2013] Intel Corporation today reported full-year revenue of $53.3 billion, operating income of $14.6 billion, net income of $11.0 billion and EPS of $2.13. The company generated approximately $18.9 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $4.4 billion, and used $4.8 billion to repurchase 191 million shares of stock.