Intel continues to benefit from the increased demand for PCs

The chip giant Intel continues to benefit from the increased demand for PCs in the corona pandemic. In the past quarter alone, Intel sold 40 percent more notebook processors than a year earlier. At the same time, however, the data center business declined year-on-year, as the company announced on Thursday after the US market closed. Consolidated sales remained virtually unchanged at $ 19.6 billion. The profit was with a minus of 0.8 percent to 5.06 billion dollars at the previous year's level. The revenues of the PC division of the group rose in view of the lower average prices of chips sold with a plus of 6.4 percent to 10.1 billion dollars, significantly less than the number of units. Revenue in the business with data centers fell within a year by 9.3 percent to 6.45 billion dollars. Intel recently got more competition in this area - and sees the initially skyrocketed demand for new servers in the Corona crisis partially saturated. Intel is in the middle of a realignment. Company boss Pat Gelsinger, who took over the helm in mid-February and came from the software company VMware, wants Intel to be more active in contract manufacturing in the future. The development of additional capacities is likely to consume a lot of time and money, which is why Intel is said to have had its eye on its competitor GlobalFoundries. Gelsinger did not want to comment on the rumors, but said that acquisitions were part of the strategy for building contract manufacturing. In addition to GlobalFoundries, analysts identify only a few takeover candidates - at a time when the entire industry is ramping up its capacities. Competitors like AMD, who rely entirely on contract manufacturers, suffer much more than Intel from the bottlenecks in semiconductor components and raw materials. The increasing digitization in the Corona crisis has recently significantly increased the demand for chips.