Intel Posts Record Revenue

Boosted by soaring processor sales, Intel yesterday report record fourth quarter revenue of $9.6 billion, up 10 percent from the year-earlier period, and net income of $2.1 billion.

Those results topped off a banner year for the semiconductor giant, pushing Intel's revenue for 2004 as a whole to $34.2 billion, up 13.5 percent from 2003. Net income for 2004 was $7.5 billion, up 33 percent from $5.6 billion in 2003.

"We ended 2004 with record revenues and robust demand for Intel architecture products across all geographies and channels," says Intel CEO Craig Barrett.

The news came a day after competitor AMD reveal that its fourth quarter earnings won't meet Wall Street's expectations. AMD's financials are being dragged down by poor flash memory sales.

That isn't the case at Intel, which says flash memory unit sales were higher last quarter. But its big bright spot was CPUs. Intel says its saw record unit shipments of both enterprise and mobile processors. In addition, both chipset and motherboard sales also set records.

Moving forward, Intel says it expects revenue in its first fiscal quarter of 2005 to be between $8.8 billion and $9.4 billion. Intel expects to spend about $5.2 billion on research and development this year, up from $4.8 billion in 2004. Capital spending, which mostly goes to chip fabrication plants and equipment, is expected to be between $4.9 billion and $5.3 billion, as compared with $3.8 billion in 2004. That increase is being driven by Intel's shift to 300-mm (12-inch) semiconductor wafers and 65-nm production equipment that's being ramped up to make the dual-core processors due later this year.