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Paul Sakuma / AP Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. |
] found itself in the financial hot seat late this afternoon after Bloomberg News said it obtained an internal Intel memo purporting to declare that the company might suffer a loss in the current quarter.However, an Intel source tells me that Bloomberg did not obtain an "internal memo" of any kind because there wasn't one. Instead, the comments may have come from a transcript of a Q&A session with employees and Intel CEO Paul Otellini following last week's quarterly earnings report. This source says, to draw the conclusion from that exchange that Intel is projecting a first quarter loss is a "stretch."
This source said that there is no way (CEO Otellini) would tell employees what he hadn't already publicly stated about the company's forecast, particularly to Wall Street analysts.
Intel officially does not comment on internal employee communications and that's where the company believes the Bloomberg story may have come from.
Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy tells me: "We never forecast profitability. We did forecast a very uncertain first quarter. We deferred a revenue forecast because we simply didn't have enough information about what the market will do."
Bloomberg reported that Intel may be on the verge of breaking a 21-year streak of profitability, and would follow the 90 percent plunge in fourth-quarter profits that the company reported last week. Bloomberg quoted Otellini as saying it was "too close to call" whether the company might swing to a loss in the current quarter.
The Intel source said that it was indeed too close to call, but that to surmise that a loss was imminent, or that a loss was somehow more probable than a profit was simply too much of a stretch.
The Bloomberg story eclipsed the positive news reported by IBM, which had the company's $3.28 profit per share soundly beating the $3.03 expected, despite its $27 billion missing revenue expectations. The $17.2 billion in services bookings, 47.3 percent gross margin, and strong software sales figures all buoyed expectations that tech might be staging a comeback. The full-year EPS expectation jumped to $9.20 a share, far ahead of the recently lowered $8.75 IBM [IBM
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The Intel news may weigh heavily on investors Wednesday as the prepare for more tech earnings from Apple [AAPL
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