The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel CEO Ke Zaiqi announced his resignation due to scandal. The company has begun to identify candidates for succession, but no matter who picks the sticks, it will be under heavy burden, because Intel's semiconductor upgrade process has become a bottleneck, facing business For the first time, the opponent has surpassed the progress of the crisis.
Affected by this bad news, Intel shares tumbled 2.6% Monday to 51.12 US dollars per share.
Intel announced last week that Koziqi’s office romance with her employees violated the company’s policy and was forced to resign, with Chief Financial Officer Robert Swan acting as CEO. Although the news shocked the outside world, it’s understood that Intel’s internal The ability of Krishna’s leadership has long been questioned.
Since the introduction of Chief Executive Officer in 2013, he has repeatedly delayed the production of a new generation of chips. Take Intel's latest 10-nanometer process as an example. In 2015, the company began mass production in the second half of last year, and will subsequently mass production. The schedule was delayed until the second half of the year, but it is delayed until next year.
In April of this year, Krzyschi stated that the rate of increase in the yield rate of the 10-nanometer process was 'not as expected', but stressed that Intel’s “absolutely leading peers in process technology and product quality”.
At present, TSMC's 7-nanometer process has been comparable to Intel's 10-nanometer process in terms of chip density, and TSMC's 7-nanometer process has begun mass production to supply wafers for Intel rivals such as Qualcomm and AMD.
Kozic said in April that Intel’s 10-nanometer process has been shipped in small quantities, but analysts fear that if Intel is unable to mass-produce it, it will face the crisis that entrepreneurs have surpassed for the first time in 50 years.
Handel Jones, head of supply chain research at IBS Chip Supply Chain, a technology consulting firm, said that assuming Intel's 10-nanometer process cannot reach volume production in the next 12 months, Intel’s chip market share will decline by up to 5 percentage points, making the company’s The price of chips will be reduced by 10~15%. If the situation does not improve, the annual revenue of Intel will be lost between 5 billion and 10 billion US dollars before fiscal year 2020.
The stagnation of 10nm process R&D also means that Intel will continue to expand its investment in equipment and technology to further erode its profits.
Although Intel did not announce the amount of investment in process upgrades in the first quarter of this year, company executives disclosed that the operating profit margin of the PC chip division in the first quarter was therefore reduced by 4 percentage points to 30%.