At this point, most folks would probably say that the ongoing chip shortage has overstayed its welcome. Substantially. Unfortunately, Intel says things won’t get much better any time soon, predicting the soonest possible end to the supply strain by 2023 and no sooner.
Intel’s pessimistic
The tech company posted its Q3 earnings last week, and while there’s immediately nothing particularly foreboding about them, the semiconductor shortage is certainly taking its toll.
Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCP), its most important revenue stream, dropped 2% year-over-year, which doesn’t seem like much at first glance but is pretty telling when compared to relative stability and growth seen in years prior. Sales were affected in particular due to lower laptop supply thanks to the chip shortage.
The company’s problem isn’t just with manufacturing CPUs either. It often finds itself lacking important materials to complete full builds.
“We call it match sets, where we may have the CPU, but you don’t have the LCD, or you don’t have the Wi-Fi,” said CEO Pat Gelsinger to CNBC. “Data centers are particularly struggling with some of the power chips and some of the networking or ethernet chips.”
“We do think the PC business is now just structurally larger, a million units-a-day kind of business,” Gelsinger went on to say.
So Intel’s problem clearly isn’t demand. It’s supply. And Gelsinger doesn’t expect that to change any time soon. According to Gelsinger, “[Intel’s] in the worst of it now, every quarter next year [it will] get incrementally better, but they’re not going to have supply-demand balance until 2023.”
It’s not all grey for the company though, which saw total revenue rise by 5% year-over-year, even if it missed its estimated $6.66 billion in sales by around $0.16 billion.