Intel Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the second quarter 2020 Intel Corporation earnings conference call. At this time, all participants' lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference Over to your host today, Mr. Trey Campbell, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome, everyone, to Intel's second 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 could 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, and thank you all for joining our call. Amid a very challenging environment, cloud and network infrastructure, and PC capabilities had been vital in allowing businesses and people to continue to work, learn, stay connected, and provide critical goods and services. Those trends contributed to a very strong quarter in which we generated $19.7 billion in revenue and delivered $1.23 in earnings per share. We exceeded our guidance by $1.2 billion on the top line, and 13 cents on the bottom line. Our data-centric businesses grew 34% and drove approximately 52% of the company's revenue. And our PC-centric businesses grew 7%. I continue to be amazed by our employees and supply chain partners who have diligently worked to keep our business operating at a high level during this unprecedented challenge. COVID-19 has driven redesigned workflows and added additional environmental stress that I know has strained employees and ecosystem partners as they try to maintain productivity in this new world. I want to thank our employees and partners for their incredible contributions. Our primary focus continues to be ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our global workforce, delivering for our customers, and helping the communities in which we operate. On each earnings call, I give updates about our progress against three key priorities, accelerating the growth of the company, improving our execution, and continuing to thoughtfully deploy your capital. Let me give you a few thoughts on each. We're transforming the company to accelerate growth. That means not just playing defense, to position our business to grow share in the largest market opportunity in our history. We've built scale businesses indexed to key technology inflections, such as cloud, AI, 5G, and the intelligent and autonomous edge. We see a world where everything increasingly looks like a computer, including our homes, our cars, our cities, our hospitals, our factories, and now even our schools. In this new world, our opportunity set becomes more than just the CPU. It's more and more Intel silicon inside more and more computers, so we can have a larger impact on our customers' success. That diversity is one critical factor in driving today's results. I'll highlight a few examples from the last 90 days. AI use cases are becoming pervasive and we are embedding AI capability into all our products. Our Xeon platform is foundational for data center AI with value, scalability, built-in AI acceleration, and inference leadership. This quarter, we launched our third generation Intel Xeon scalable processor, Cooper Lake, which is the first mainstream server CPU BFloat 16 support, which increases AI throughput by reducing the amount of data required for the same accuracy. Developers can use and test latest Intel optimized versions of TensorFlow and PyTorch to train their models using BFloat 16 and the Intel distribution of OpenVINO to deploy optimized inference from cloud to edge. In Q2, both our cloud and comms service provider businesses grew more than 40% year-over-year as critical cloud-delivered applications continued to scale and 5G build-outs accelerated. Leading cloud service providers, including Alibaba, Baidu, Facebook, and Tencent, announced they are adopting our third-gen Intel Xeon scalable processors into their infrastructure and services. Also this quarter, Azure introduced several new Xeon scalable instances, including general-purpose and memory-optimized Azure virtual machines. We were also excited to be part of an industry first with Rakuten's full-scale commercial launch of its mobile carrier service. This service is the world's first end-to-end fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network and it's powered by Intel processors and FPGAs from the radio access network to the 5G-ready mobile core. Compute capabilities are moving from the cloud to the edge and catalyzing a vast array of new usages and market opportunities. The largest opportunity we see at the edge is the $230 billion 2030 TAM for ADAS. data, and mobility-as-a-service technologies. Since the last call, we acquired Moovit, a leading mobility-as-a-service solution company. Combining mobilized market-leading ADAS and AV technologies with Moovit accelerates our ability to become a full-stack mobility provider and truly revolutionize transportation. The most important demonstration of the power of our technologies is the commitment of our customers, and we are excited this week to announce a significant design win with Ford. Design wins to date in 2020 include multiple new ADAS production programs representing cumulative volume of over 20 million units. We're also driving incredible innovation for our customers across a wide spectrum of PC use cases. This quarter, we introduced three new additions to our 10th Gen processor family, extending our leadership in gaming and business. The Core S&H Series processors for desktop and mobile gaming deliver speeds out of the box reaching up to 5.3 GHz, making them the world's fastest gaming processors. and our new 10th Gen Intel Core vPro processors delivered uncompromised productivity and hardware-based security for commercial PCs. Q2 also marked the launch of Lakefield, featuring our new Intel Hybrid technology, which is a hybrid CPU architecture for power and performance scalability. We also continue to work on improving our execution. Intel employees and our supply chain partners have role-modeled teamwork in navigating difficult conditions while working to support customer upsides during the crisis. We have made significant progress in increasing our capacity and improving our supply while delivering $2 billion above our plans through the first six months of the year. We're on track to return to more normal levels of PC inventory as we work through the second half of the year. Acceleration of our next-generation products continues. We now expect to increase our 10-nanometer-based product shipments for the year by more than 20% versus our January expectations. Customer demand for our family of 10-nanometer-based SOCs for 5G base station designs is also very strong. We delivered a full node of performance improvement within our 14-nanometer-based products by optimizing our product and process together, and the power of our intranode improvements continues with our next-generation 10-nanometer-based client product, Tiger Lake. Tiger Lake delivers breakthrough performance in CPU, graphics, and AI, and will be shipping to customers in a matter of weeks. We are also targeting initial production shipments for our first 10-nanometer base Xeon scalable product, Ice Lake, for the end of the year. And we have a pipeline of exciting new product architectures for 2021, led by Alder Lake for client and Sapphire Rapids for server. Both products will start initial production shipments in the second half of 21. Let me provide some updates on our technology roadmap. We continue to demonstrate proof points of our breakthrough advanced packaging technologies. Our Lakefield product, which I mentioned earlier, delivers scale production of our 3D packaging technology, Phobros, combining both 10 nanometer and 22 nanometer capabilities in a disaggregated architecture. This quarter also marked a significant milestone in our data center GPU technology. we successfully powered a petaflop-scale GPU with high bandwidth memory using our advanced embedded multi-die interconnect bridge, or EMIB, 2D packaging technology. Turning to our 7-nanometer technology, we are seeing an approximate six-month shift in our 7-nanometer-based CPU product timing relative to prior expectations. The primary driver is the yield of our 7-nanometer process. which, based on recent data, is now trending approximately 12 months behind our internal target. We have identified a defect mode in our 7-nanometer process that resulted in yield degradation. We've root-caused the issue and believe there are no fundamental roadblocks, but we have also invested in contingency plans to hedge against further schedule uncertainty. We're mitigating the impact of the process delay on our product schedules by leveraging improvements in design methodology, such as dye disaggregation and advanced packaging. We have learned from the challenges in our 10-nanometer transition and have a milestone-driven approach to ensure our product competitiveness is not impacted by our process technology roadmap. Our overarching priority is to deliver product leadership for our customers, and we are taking the right steps to produce a strong lineup of leadership products. We will continue to invest in our future process technology roadmap, but we will be pragmatic and objective in deploying the process technology that delivers the most predictability and performance for our customers, whether that be on our process, external foundry process, or a combination of both. Our advanced packaging technologies combined with our disaggregated architecture give us tremendous flexibility to use the process technology that best serves our customers. As an example, our data center GPU design, Ponte Vecchio, will now be released in late 2021 or early 2022 utilizing external and internal process technologies combined with our world-leading packaging technologies. We now expect to see initial production shipments of our first Intel-based 7-nanometer product, a client CPU, in late 22 or early 23. We are also focused on maintaining an annual cadence of significant product improvements independent of our process roadmap. including the holiday refresh window of 2022. In addition, we expect to see initial production shipments of our first Intel-based seven nanometer data center CPU design in the first half of 23. Finally, while process technology is very important, it is only one of the six technology pillars of innovation that drive differentiation in our products. You will hear more about advances across all six technology pillars, process, packaging, architecture, memory, interconnect, and security slash software at the upcoming Intel Architecture Day. Last, we are focused on the thoughtful allocation of your capital. We are investing to grow our capabilities even as we deliver significant free cash flow this year. Since 2015, we have grown R&D spending by more than a billion dollars while divesting non-core assets and reducing overall spending as a percentage of revenue by nine points. We also look for opportunities to augment our product lines and speed the pace at which we can grow the company. As discussed earlier, we acquired Moovit this quarter. investing approximately $900 million to dramatically accelerate our capability to capitalize on $160 billion mobility-as-a-service opportunity. We also announced a $250 million investment in GeoPlatforms, a high-speed wireless connectivity and digital services provider to help fuel digital transformation in India. Our purpose to deliver world-changing technology that enriches the lives of every person on Earth has never been more essential. But the global problems we face are bigger than any one company can solve alone. That's why we established 2030 Corporate Responsibility Goals, which call for a collective response to revolutionize health and safety, make technology fully inclusive, and help address climate change. We've also committed more than $50 million and extended our expertise, global reach, and influence to combat COVID-19, as well as social injustice. The early results of our Pandemic Response Technology Initiative, which we announced earlier this week, underscore Intel's unique ability to partner and collectively solve critical problems. In closing, I want to thank all our employees who are working through this challenging time to deliver our purpose and support our customers.