Intel sees down Q1 sales down 5%-7% as ‘right starting point for seasonality’

Asked at the UBS Global TMT conference about "the shape of next year" in terms of sales and seasonality, Intel executives said "visibility isn’t pristine in this case," but they estimate that the inventory digestion that has been going on with their customers "probably doesn’t finish at the end of this year" and that it will likely continue into next year while being coupled with macro headwinds. In that context, an executive at the company stated that Intel "won’t be probably out of the woods in terms of inventory digestion at the end of Q4." The executive said: "So we would model something no better than seasonal… depending on the mathematical analysis you do, if you go back three years, it’s actually more like low single digit declines. If you go out more like five to seven years, you get more to this 5%-7%, which I think is the right starting point for seasonality because the last couple years have been so noisy with COVID and so forth, its kind of hard to get good data. And so, that’s kind of the near-term, obviously it’s macro driven."