
America is returning, its president claims, to a golden age. One company for whom that would be a dream come true is Intel. The US chipmaker had a $500bn market capitalisation back in 2000. Now, it is worth about $90bn — a piteous decline.
New chief executive Lip-Bu Tan is not promising a return to that gilded era. Far from it: after years of Intel missing its own targets, he kicked off his first quarterly earnings call by vowing to make difficult decisions, but with no ambitious numerical goals, and no quick fixes. Things may get worse before they get better for a company that has gone from $20bn of net income in 2021 to five consecutive quarters of losses.