A major shareholder of Intel, with a capital in the company of a billion dollars, wants to win back Apple as a customer. It's the message of desperation you just sent to the company. And I say despair because this year that we have closed the shares of the chipmaker have fallen 21 percent.
This means that the aforementioned investor has lost the interface of 210 million dollars at a stroke. The truth is that I would not like to be in the shoes of the leaders of Intel in the next meeting of shareholders.
An Intel shareholder with a stake valued at one billion dollars (at the beginning of 2020) has publicly expressed its displeasure with the company. He thinks that Intel needs to make very drastic changes, and one of them is trying to recover Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), as a customer.
The truth is that the "poor" shareholder has reason enough to be angry with the chipmaker. Intel shares have fallen 21% over the course of 2020 after the investment of 10 figures from the mutual fund Third point, so it is not for less.
Shareholder wants Intel to stop making chips
Reuters reports that Third Point is pressuring Intel management to get the company to abandon chip manufacturing, focus on its design and development, and subsequently delegate to other companies such as TSMC the manufacture of such designs.
A compelling reason to argue for such a desire is that Intel has lagged behind in manufacturing capabilities, still making chips with 10nm and 14nm processes, while TSMC has progressed to 5 nm. Both the A14 chip in the iPhone 12 and the M1 chip in the latest Macs are produced by TSMC using a 5nm process. The company plans to use a 4nm process for the iPhone 2022 lineup. There is no color.
In the letter that the investor has sent to the president of Intel, he also argues the changes for the political: “Without immediate change at Intel, we fear that US access to cutting-edge semiconductor supply will erode, forcing the US to rely more on geopolitically unstable East Asia for the supply of processors, from those needed for computers , servers, to data centers, infrastructures, etc ».
The truth is that large American companies like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, are developing their own processors and submitting those designs to be manufactured in East Asia, he wrote. Third Point wants Intel to offer new solutions to retain these customers instead of letting them run away doing nothing.
These are bad times for the processor manufacturer that was leader indisputable in the market, and that perhaps it rested on its laurels without preparing for a much more competitive future, a future that is already a present.