Intel reports steep drop in Q1 revenue, looks for stability in 2nd half of year

Citing steep drops for its Client Computing Group and Data Center and AI groups, Intel reported Q1 revenue of $11.7 billion, down 36% year over year. First-quarter GAAP earnings (loss) per share (EPS) attributable to Intel was $(0.66); non-GAAP EPS attributable to Intel was $(0.04).

Despite challenges, Intel said it now expects some modest recovery in the second half of the year along with increasing stability in the PC market as inventory corrections are worked through. However, the server and networking markets have yet to reach their bottoms, as cloud and enterprise remain weak.

“We delivered solid first-quarter results, representing steady progress with our transformation,” said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. “We hit key execution milestones in our data center roadmap and demonstrated the health of the process technology underpinning it. While we remain cautious on the macroeconomic outlook, we are focused on what we can control as we deliver on IDM 2.0: driving consistent execution across process and product roadmaps and advancing our foundry business to best position us to capitalize on the $1 trillion market opportunity ahead.”

David Zinsner, Intel CFO, said, “We exceeded our first-quarter expectations on the top and bottom line, and continued to be disciplined on expense management as part of our commitment to drive efficiencies and cost savings. At the same time, we are prioritizing the investments needed to advance our strategy and establish an internal foundry model, one of the most consequential steps we are taking to deliver on IDM 2.0.”

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1615/intel-reports-first-quarter-2023-financial-results

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AWS sales increased 16% y-o-y in Q1, operating income drops 21%

AWS  sales increased 16% year-over-year in Q1 2023 to reach $21.4 billion, representing 16% of Amazon.com overall revenue for the quarter. 

Q1 operating income for AWS amounted to $5.123 billion, down 21% year-over-year and down 26% when adjusting for constant currency.

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, states "while our AWS business navigates companies spending more cautiously in this macro environment, we continue to prioritize building long-term customer relationships both by helping customers save money and enabling them to more easily leverage technologies like Large Language Models and Generative AI with our uniquely cost-effective machine learning chips (“Trainium” and “Inferentia”), managed Large Language Models (“Bedrock”), and AI code companion CodeWhisperer. We like the fundamentals we’re seeing in AWS, and believe there’s much growth ahead.”

Amazon also highlighted the following AWS customer wins for Q1:

• Southwest Airlines selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider for a large-scale modernization as part of the airline’s long-term plan to optimize airline operations, streamline infrastructure costs, and provide a more seamless and enjoyable travel experience to customers.
• Zurich Insurance Group is moving its enterprise information technology infrastructure, including 1,000 applications over the next three years, to AWS to deliver new digital customer experiences and drive automation at scale.
• BBVA is employing AWS’s extensive portfolio of cloud services to launch new financial solutions that will help BBVA Corporate and Investment Banking expand its business to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, scale quickly, and increase flexibility.
• Broadridge’s LTX electronic trading platform completed a successful migration of its corporate bond e- trading platform to AWS.
• S&P Global and AWS announced a multiyear strategic collaboration to extend the delivery of advanced, secure, cloud-based services to more than 100,000 of S&P Global’s government and enterprise customers in 43 countries around the world.
• Snowflake and AWS announced a new commitment to build joint industry-specific solutions, increase sales collaboration, and deepen product integration, including further streamlining running Snowflake on Graviton processors. Approximately 84% of Snowflake’s customers run their deployments on AWS to rapidly innovate.
• Stripe announced a new global agreement to run virtually all their infrastructure on AWS while reliably serving millions of internet companies.
• Westpac, one of Australia’s leading banks, expanded its collaboration with AWS through a new five-year agreement that will tap into advanced AWS capabilities, like machine learning, compute, and data analytics, to further accelerate the bank’s digital transformation, drive cost efficiencies, and personalize its banking applications.
• T-Mobile is integrating its 5G Advanced Network Solutions portfolio with AWS to help customers more easily discover, customize, and deploy 5G edge computing.
• Marvell selected AWS to rapidly scale its electronic design automation in the cloud to address increasingly complex chip design processes and deliver continuous innovation for expanding needs across the automotive, carrier, data center, and enterprise infrastructure markets.
• TELUS, one of Canada’s leading telecommunications providers, is collaborating with AWS to develop a new smart-living solution that will reduce the need for multiple smart-home apps, simplify installation, and enable new multidevice automation.
• Iberdrola, one of the world’s largest clean energy companies, selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to support the energy company as it embarks on further digitalization to enable smarter grids, customer engagement, and connected clean power.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q1/Q1-2023-Amazon-Earnings-Release.pdf

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T-Mobile US posts growth in customers and profitability, raises guidance

T-Mobile US reported Q1 service revenues of $15.5 billion, up 3% year-over-year, including postpaid service revenue growth of 6% year-over-year.

Net income of $1.9 billion grew 172% year-over-year and diluted earnings per share (“EPS”) of $1.58 grew 177% year-over-year.

"T-Mobile’s focused execution against our intentional growth plan delivered best-in-class postpaid and broadband customer and profitability growth in Q1 that gave us confidence to raise our 2023 guidance for customers and profitability,” said T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert. 

Some highlights:

• Postpaid net account additions of 287 thousand decreased 61 thousand year-over-year, reflecting continued industry-leading share of net account additions in an environment of industry growth normalization toward pre-pandemic levels.
• Postpaid net customer additions of 1.3 million decreased 25 thousand year-over-year, reflecting continued normalization of industry growth.
• Postpaid phone net customer additions of 538 thousand decreased 51 thousand year-over-year while reflecting a higher share of industry net additions. Postpaid phone churn of 0.89% improved 4 bps year-over-year.
• Prepaid net customer additions of 26 thousand decreased 36 thousand year-over-year, and Prepaid churn was 2.76%.
• High Speed Internet net customer additions of 523 thousand increased 185 thousand year-over-year. T-Mobile ended the quarter with 3.2 million High Speed Internet customers.
• Total net customer additions of 1.3 million decreased 61 thousand year-over-year. The total customer count increased to a record high of 114.9 million.

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POET Technologies intros light source for AI applications

POET Technologies introduced a packaged light source solution for AI applications. 

POET’s Starlight products integrate active components like lasers and certain other passive optical and electrical components into the optical interposer to provide a complete light source solution that can be integrated on a host board and connected to chips and ASICs with built-in silicon photonics.  POET achieves its low-cost solution through the use of features and benefits of the POET Optical Interposer platform and the “semiconductorization” of photonics fabrication processes.

POET’s Starlight C-Band and O-Band LightBar products incorporate monolithically integrated passive components like multiplexers, demultiplexers, splitters, combiners, and waveguides. Known-good high power CW lasers and monitor photodiodes are flip chipped and passively attached to the optical interposer platform. POET expects to complete design verification testing and reliability qualification of the Starlight engines by the end of 2023 and start production in the second half of 2024. 

POET also noted an agreement with Celestial AI, creators of the Photonic Fabric, for development and production of POET Starlight packaged light sources and has received an advanced purchase order for initial production units.

“External light sources for Artificial Intelligence applications has been one of the key verticals for POET Technologies. We are delighted to continue to work with Celestial AI to provide a high-volume manufacturable solution for their optical interconnect technology platform,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman and CEO of POET Technologies.  “The ability for POET to passively attach high power CW lasers on its optical interposer at wafer scale enables the use of single known-good laser chips and eliminates the need for laser arrays which can be cost prohibitive for high-volume applications. The POET team has worked closely with Celestial AI to define a low-cost packaging solution that is up to 75% lower in cost than competing solutions and is highly scalable for the volumes that Celestial AI is projecting.”

https://poet-technologies.com/news/2023-apr-25.html

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Google Cloud Security AI Workbench leverages LLMs

Google Cloud introduced a security platform powered by specialized large-language-model (LLM) artificial intelligence.

Google Cloud Security AI Workbench addresses three top security challenges: threat overload, toilsome tools, and the talent gap. The platform le customers make their private data available to the platform at inference time. It is also extensible for third-party security tools.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/rsa-google-cloud-security-ai-workbench-generative-ai

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Vodafone appoints Margherita Della Valle as Group CEO

 Vodafone has appointed Margherita Della Valle as its new Group Chief Executive.

Della Valle currently serves as the company's CFO. Her previous roles within Vodafone were Deputy Chief Financial Officer from 2015 to 2018, Group Financial Controller, Chief Financial Officer for Vodafone’s European region and Chief Financial Officer for Vodafone Italy. She joined Omnitel Pronto Italia - which later became Vodafone Italy - in 1994 and held various consumer marketing positions in business analytics and customer base management before moving to finance.

Jean-François van Boxmeer, Vodafone Group Chairman said:

“On behalf of the Board, I am delighted to announce the appointment of Margherita as Group Chief Executive, following a rigorous internal and external search. Margherita has a strong track record during her long career at Vodafone in marketing, operational, commercial and financial positions. Over the last few months as interim Group Chief Executive, the Board and I have been impressed with her pace and decisiveness to begin the necessary transformation of Vodafone. Margherita has the full support of myself and the Board for her plans for Vodafone to provide better customer experience, become a simpler business and accelerate growth.”

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