Intel Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the fourth quarter 2019 Intel Corporation Earnings Conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Drake Campbell, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

and welcome everyone to Intel's fourth quarter earnings conference call. By now, you should have received a copy of our earnings release and the earnings presentation. If you've not received both documents, they're available on our investor website, intc.com. The earnings presentation is also available in the webcast window for those joining us online. I'm joined today by our CEO, Bob Swan, and our CFO, George Davis. In a moment, we'll hear brief remarks from both of them, followed by Q&A. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it, and as such, does include risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our press release for more information on the specific risk factors that can cause actual results to differ materially. A brief reminder that this quarter we have provided both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Today we will be speaking to the non-GAAP financial measures when describing our consolidated results. The earnings presentation and earnings release available on intc.com include the full GAAP and non-GAAP reconciliations. With that, let me hand it over to Bob.

Thanks, Trey. We exceeded our expectations for Q4-19, capping off a fourth consecutive record year. In Q4, we generated $20.2 billion in revenue and $1.52 in earnings per share, exceeding our guidance by $1.028 billion, respectively. For the full year, we delivered $72 billion in revenue and $4.87 in EPS. The PC, data center, IoT, memory, and Mobileye businesses each set all-time annual revenue records. Several years ago, we began a transformation to reposition the company to take advantage of the data revolution that is reshaping computing. Exiting this quarter, we now have greater than 50% of our revenue coming from our data-centric collection of businesses. But our journey is just beginning. To reach our multi-year goals, we will continuously focus on three key priorities, accelerating growth, improving execution, and deploying our capital for attractive returns. I'd like to share our progress against these priorities over the last 90 days. We are accelerating growth by expanding the capabilities of our workload optimized platforms and playing a larger role in our customers' success. Demand for our Intel Xeon scalable processors is very strong as customers continue to make Xeon the foundation for their AI-infused data center workloads. One of the reasons Cascade Lake is our fastest-ramping Xeon CPU is its unrivaled AI performance. Xeon's AI performance will take another step in the first half of 2020 when our third-generation Xeon scalable processor, Cooper Lake, debuts. Cooper Lake features new Intel DL Boost extensions for built-in AI training acceleration, providing up to a 60% increase in training performance over the previous family. Additionally, we've been expanding beyond the CPU and the data center with products such as Optane persistent memory, custom ASICs, Ethernet, and silicon photonics. In Q4, data center adjacent products grew more than 30% year over year. In client computing, we are seeing excellent momentum for our first 10 nanometer mobile CPU, Ice Lake, with 44 system designs already shipping. In addition to our CPU capabilities, we continue to deliver leadership PC platform connectivity. With Wi-Fi 6, we're delivering gig plus speeds, and for wired connectivity, we just announced Thunderbolt 4 for platforms in 2020. At CES, we also showed customer momentum for our Project Athena innovation program, including the first Project Athena verified Chromebooks. Project Athena verified laptops, have been tuned, tested, and verified to deliver fantastic system-level innovation and benefits spanning battery life, consistent responsiveness, instant wake, application compatibility, and more. We verified 26 Project Athena designs to date and expect 50 more devices across Windows and Chrome to be verified this year. In addition to strengthening our largest businesses, we're investing to win key data-driven technology inflections. These inflections include the rise of artificial intelligence, the transformation of networks, and emergence of the intelligent and autonomous edge. The market for AI-based silicon is growing and evolving quickly. New workloads are emerging and existing workloads, like high-performance computing, are converging with AI. In 2019, we generated $3.8 billion in AI-based revenue. The AI market opportunity is expected to be $25 billion by 2024, and we're investing to lead with a strong portfolio of products. In addition to integrating AI into all our leading products, we've introduced and acquired new capabilities that deepen an already unparalleled portfolio of AI assets. We announced the acquisition of Habana Labs, a leading developer of programmable deep learning accelerators for the data center. Habana, combined with Intel's existing AI ASICs and software expertise, will advance our AI offerings for the data center with high-performance training and inference processors and a standards-based programming environment to address evolving AI workloads. Delivering the optimal AI silicon architecture is critical, but not sufficient to solve customers' problems. That's why we launched the OneAPI industry initiative to deliver a unified and simplified programming model for application development across heterogeneous processing architectures. OneAPI marks a game-changing evolution from today's limiting proprietary program approaches to an open standards-based model for cross-architecture developer engagement and innovation. As expected, our networking business reached $5 billion in revenue in 2019. We've grown our business by helping our customers transform their networks by consolidating and virtualizing workloads on Intel architecture-based servers. Now, as we advance into the 5G era, we see our momentum in design wind pipeline accelerating as we're positioned to win significant share in base stations. This quarter, we announced a strategic agreement with Alibaba to support both the Tokyo and Beijing Olympics. building out 5G infrastructure utilizing Xeon Scalable, Optane Persistent Memory, and Intel software. These data-optimized 5G networks will support amazing experiences such as immersive 8K VR, cloud 3D stadium simulations, and cloud broadcasting. We also delivered almost $5 billion in annual revenue from our IoT slash Edge portfolio of products. In November, we disclosed our next-gen MoVIDIA's vision processing unit, TeamBay. TeamBay is highly optimized for edge inference with groundbreaking leaps forward in power-efficient performance, delivering up to 4x the performance or 6x the performance per watt over comparable competitive solutions. It's been over two years since the acquisition of Mobileye, and we couldn't be more excited about the team's progress. This quarter, we announced several exciting new engagements. We established an agreement for REM data harvesting with SAIC Motor and embarked on a strategic partnership with NIO to deploy a mobilized self-driving system as the full-stack solution for NIO's consumer AV. We also continue to accelerate the commercialization of driverless mobility as a service with two new partnerships. RATP in Paris, and Daegu City in South Korea. In Q4, we were also excited to host analysts and investors at Mobilize headquarters to discuss our strategy to win the more than $70 billion opportunity for ADAS, AV, and data, and to expand our aspirations to an even larger role in the $160 billion opportunity for mobility as a service. Our guests had the chance to test drive our technology on the demanding roads of Jerusalem as we demonstrated industry's leading AV solution stack, navigating a wide variety of driving complexities and delivering unmatched agility and safety. We have significant opportunities, but realizing them requires improved execution, starting with delivering more supply for our customers. In response to continued strong demand, we invested record levels of CapEx in 2018 and 2019. That added capacity allowed us to increase our second half 2019 PC CPU supply by double digits relative to the first half. However, demand has continued to outpace PC supply, and supply remains tight in our PC business. We're continuing to add capacity so we're not constraining our customers' growth. Across our 14 and 10 nanometer nodes, we're adding 25 percent wafer capacity this year to deliver a high single-digit increase in PC unit volume. This will enable us to meet market demand, deliver our 2020 financial plan, and increase inventory to more normalized levels. Our near-term challenge is working with our customers to support their desired product mix. Our process technology execution continues to improve. In Q4, we ramped our 10 nanometer production and continue to see yields improve. We are planning nine new product releases on 10 nanometer this year, including our next-gen mobile CPU, a 5G base station SOC, an AI inference accelerator, our first discrete GPU, and Xeon for server, storage, and networking. We're also on track to deliver 10 nanometer plus this year, our first performance upgrade on 10 nanometer. Our 7 nanometer process remains on track to deliver our lead 7 nanometer product, Ponte Vecchio, at the end of 2021. with CPU products following shortly after in 2022. We are also driving innovation in the next generation of computing. At CES, we provided a first look at our next-gen Intel Core mobile processor, codenamed Tiger Lake, which is designed to offer groundbreaking advancements when it ships later this year. Tiger Lake, built on Intel's 10-nanometer-plus process, will deliver significant gains in compute AI, graphics, and interconnect over the prior generation. We will also deliver initial production shipments on our first 10 nanometer base Xeon scalable product, Ice Lake, in the latter part of 2020. We're also investing to lead the next wave of technology breakthroughs such as quantum computing. Our investment in quantum computing covers the full hardware and software stack in pursuit of a practical, commercially viable quantum system. For example, last month we unveiled a first-of-its-kind cryogenic control chip, ForceRidge, that will speed up development of full-stack quantum computing systems. We made good progress this quarter but will continue to be laser-focused on improving our execution. That means delivering the supply leadership process technology, and product innovations that allow us to play a larger role in our customer success. Our third priority is to thoughtfully deploy your capital to deliver attractive returns. That means first investing in the R&D and CapEx necessary to drive our long-term business plan. Since 2015, we have grown revenue by more than $16 billion, while reducing spending by 500 million. Spending as a percentage of revenue is down nine points, while over the same period we've increased R&D spending by 1.2 billion. We acquired Habana Labs, a fantastic company that will accelerate our AI plans while also making thoughtful disinvestments. We closed both the 5G smartphone modem exit and the sale of IMFT in the quarter. We are confident in our future, and consistent with that, our board has approved a 5% increase in our dividend to $1.32 per share. Last quarter, we announced a commitment to execute $20 billion in share repurchases over the next 15 to 18 months. And three months into that window, we've already repurchased $3.5 billion in shares. Finally, our role goes beyond delivering strong results to being a great corporate citizen that has real impact on the world around us and in the communities where we work. I'm proud of the many outside recognitions we've received for our responsible business practices. This reflects our culture and the efforts of our 100,000 plus employees around the world. Also, we continue to believe that a diverse workforce and inclusive culture are essential for executing our growth strategy. which is why we release detailed workforce representation data that raises the bar on ourselves and others for continued improvement. And it's important to us to be a leader in environmental sustainability, and we're investing to continue to increase the energy efficiency of our operations and our products. And we're also making significant progress on our goal of restoring 100% of our global water use by 2025. Back at our May Analyst Day, we told you that the industry was at an inflection point where the exponential growth of data is fueling massive expansion in multi-cloud environments, transforming networks, and catalyzing the intelligent edge. We believe we are well positioned to lead this data revolution, and we expect to generate $85 billion in revenue and $6 in earnings per share in the next three to four years. One year into that plan, we are tracking well ahead of our commitment. We have $3 billion more revenue, and we've earned an additional 52 cents in earnings versus our May expectations. Our expectation is to continue to make deposits towards our multi-year goal every 90 days. In summary, Our priorities are to accelerate growth, improve execution, and thoughtfully deploy our capital on behalf of our owners like you. I'm excited about the opportunities in front of us and appreciate your continued support. I'll now hand the call over to George for details on our Q4 results and business outlook.