風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop 'non-essential work’
Aug 1, 2024
The full memo from CEO of Intel Pat Gelsinger
英特爾首席執行官帕特·基辛格的完整備忘錄
團隊，
在財報電話會議之後，我們將全公司會議移至今天，因為我們將宣布降低成本的重大措施。我們計劃在2025年實現100億美元的成本節約，其中包括裁員約 15,000人，占員工總數的15%。這些措施大部分將在今年年底前完成。
這對我來說是一個痛苦的消息。我知道這對你們來說會更加難以接受。對於英特爾來說，這是極其艱難的一天，因為我們正在進行公司曆史上一些最重要的變革。幾個小時後我們開會時，我會談談我們這樣做的原因以及未來幾周你們可以期待什麽。在此之前，我想先預覽一下我的想法。
簡而言之，我們必須將成本結構與新的運營模式相結合，從根本上改變我們的運營方式。我們的收入沒有像預期的那樣增長——而且我們尚未充分受益於人工智能等強大的趨勢。我們的成本太高，利潤太低。我們需要采取更大膽的行動來解決這兩個問題——尤其是考慮到我們的財務業績和 2024 年下半年的前景，這比之前預期的要艱難。
這些決定對我的內心構成了挑戰，這是我職業生涯中最艱難的事情。我向你們保證，在未來幾周和幾個月裏，我們將優先考慮誠實、透明和尊重的文化。
下周，我們將宣布一項針對符合條件的員工的全公司增強型退休計劃，並廣泛提供自願離職的申請計劃。我相信，我們如何實施這些變化與變化本身同樣重要，我們將在整個過程中堅持英特爾的價值觀。
為什麽是現在？
自從推出新的運營模式以來，我們就對業務進行了全新的審視，並根據高績效代工廠、無晶圓廠產品公司和公司職能部門的基準對自己進行了評估。這項工作清楚地表明，我們的成本結構不具競爭力。
例如，2020 年我們的年收入比去年高出約 240 億美元，但我們目前的員工人數實際上比當時增加了 10%。造成這種情況的原因有很多，但這不是一條可持續的前進道路。
除了成本之外，我們還需要改變運營方式——在我們的員工體驗調查中，你們中的許多人都分享了這一點。流程太複雜了，所以我們需要自動化和簡化流程。決策需要很長時間，所以我們需要消除官僚主義。係統中效率太低，所以我們需要加快工作流程。
關鍵優先事項
我們正在采取的行動將使英特爾成為一家更精簡、更簡單、更敏捷的公司。讓我強調一下我們的重點領域：
降低運營成本：我們將推動全公司的運營和成本效率，包括上述成本節約和員工人數減少。
簡化我們的產品組合：我們將在本月完成簡化業務的行動。每個業務部門都在進行產品組合審查，並確定表現不佳的產品。我們還將關鍵軟件資產整合到我們的業務部門中，以便我們加快向基於係統的解決方案的轉變。我們將把孵化重點縮小到更少、更有影響力的項目上。
消除複雜性：我們將減少層級，消除重疊的責任領域，停止非必要工作，並培養一種更大的主人翁意識和責任感的文化。例如，我們將把客戶成功整合到銷售、營銷和傳播集團，以簡化我們的上市流程。
降低資本和其他成本：隨著我們曆史性的四年五個節點路線圖的完成，我們將審查所有活躍的項目和設備，以便我們開始將重點轉向資本效率和更正常的支出水平。這將使我們 2024 年的資本支出減少 20% 以上，我們計劃在 2025 年將非變動銷售成本減少約 10 億美元。
暫停派息：我們將從下個季度開始暫停派息，以優先投資業務並實現更持續的盈利。
保持增長投資：我們的 IDM2.0 戰略保持不變。在努力重建創新引擎之後，我們將繼續對工藝技術和核心產品領導地位進行關鍵投資。
未來
我並不幻想我們麵前的道路會一帆風順。你也不應該這樣。今天對我們所有人來說都是艱難的一天，未來還會有更多艱難的日子。但盡管這一切都很困難，我們正在做出必要的改變，以鞏固我們的進步並迎來一個新的增長時代。
當我們開始這段旅程時，我們誌存高遠，知道英特爾是一個偉大創意誕生的地方，可能性的力量戰勝了現狀。畢竟，我們的使命是創造改變世界的技術，
證明地球上每個人的生活。我們盡最大努力，比世界上任何一家公司都更能體現這些理想。
為了實現這一使命，我們必須繼續推動我們的 IDM 2.0 戰略，該戰略保持不變：重新確立工藝技術領導地位；通過擴大美國和歐盟的製造能力，投資大規模、全球彈性供應鏈；成為內部和外部客戶的世界級、前沿代工廠；重建產品組合領導地位；實現無處不在的人工智能。
在過去幾年中，我們重建了一個可持續的創新引擎，該引擎基本到位並步入正軌。現在是時候專注於構建推動我們業績所需的可持續財務引擎了。我們必須提高執行力，適應新的市場現實，並以更敏捷的方式運營。這就是我們采取行動的精神——我們知道，我們今天做出的選擇，盡管很困難，但將增強我們服務客戶和未來幾年發展業務的能力。
在我們踏上征程的下一步時，我們不要忘記，我們所做的事情從未像現在這樣迫切。世界將越來越多地依靠矽片運轉——世界需要一個健康而充滿活力的英特爾。這就是我們所做工作如此重要的原因。我們不僅要重塑一家偉大的公司，而且還要創造技術和製造能力，這將在未來幾十年重塑世界。這是我們在追求目標的過程中永遠不應忽視的事情。
幾個小時後我們會繼續討論。請帶著您的問題來，以便我們能夠就下一步進行公開而坦誠的討論。
Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop 'non-essential work’
After losses, the chipmaker is cutting $10 billion in costs.
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Aug 1, 2024, 4:14 PM EDT
Intel’s on a long, long road to recovery, and over 15,000 workers will no longer be coming along for the ride. The chipmaker just announced it’s downsizing its workforce by over 15 percent as part of a new $10 billion cost savings plan for 2025, which will mean a headcount reduction of greater than 15,000 roles, Intel tells The Verge. The company currently employs over 125,000 workers, so layoffs could be as many as 19,000 people.
Intel will reduce its R&D and marketing spend by billions each year through 2026; it will reduce capital expenditures by more than 20 percent this year; it will restructure to “stop non-essential work,” and it’ll review “all active projects and equipment” to make sure it’s not spending too much.
“This is painful news for me to share. I know it will be even more difficult for you to read,” reads part of a memo from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to staff, which you can also read in full at the bottom of this post.
“We will reduce layers, eliminate overlapping areas of responsibility, stop non-essential work...”
The company just reported a loss of $1.6 billion for Q2 2024, substantially more than the $437 million it lost last quarter. “Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones,” admitted Gelsinger in the company’s press release. “Our revenues have not grown as expected — and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI,” he writes in his employee memo.
Second quarter revenue was $12.8 billion, down just 1 percent year over year, and it’s not like all of Intel’s businesses are failing. While Intel has absolutely been losing money on its chipmaking Foundry business as it invests in new factories and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, to the tune of $7 billion in operating losses in 2023 and another $2.8 billion this quarter, the company’s products themselves aren’t unprofitable.
Almost all the losses this quarter and last quarter came from Foundry, while its sales continue to stay relatively stable and its PC and server businesses stay profitable. (The PC sales slump ended earlier this year.) The company is also set to receive up to $8.5 billion in US government funding from the CHIPS Act.
But investors didn’t seem happy that the company kept itself on a knife’s edge: over the past two years, before this quarterly loss, it had continued to swing between losses and profits overall, for just $1.1 billion in cumulative profit between Q2 2022 and Q1 2024. “Intel is now the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year,” CNBC wrote in April.
Related
-
This is Lunar Lake — Intel’s utterly overhauled AI laptop chip
-
There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent
From a tech leadership perspective, Intel’s not yet a big player in AI server chips like Nvidia (maybe not even a notable small one like AMD), its relatively recent entry into graphics has yet to impress, and it had to overhaul its flagship laptop chips significantly to address the existential threat of Arm chips from the likes of Qualcomm and Apple, which can offer more battery life than Intel. Like competitors, the company now partially relies on TSMC, not just its own foundries, to help produce some of its most advanced chips.
Microsoft recently followed Apple’s lead in ditching Intel chips for its latest slate of consumer hardware, including the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, and launched its Copilot Plus PC initiative exclusively with Qualcomm, without waiting for Intel (or AMD)’s new flagship laptop chips to join them. Intel is currently dealing with two generations of potentially defective desktop CPUs, though the company currently believes it can mitigate the issue with a software update and doesn’t currently plan recalls.
On the company’s earnings call today, Intel CFO David Zinsner just suggested that the company’s next flagship AI laptop chip, Lunar Lake, won’t be enough by itself to turn things around.
While he says “the AI PC is a big winner for the company,” and Intel plans to “ramp that product significantly next year to meet market demand,” he also described Lunar Lake as a “narrow targeted product” that relies on “external wafers” (read: manufactured by TSMC, not Intel). Intel also needs to buy the memory it’s including on each chip, as Lunar Lake laptops don’t have separate memory sticks.
Those are reasons why Lunar Lake will only modestly improve the company’s situation in 2025, he says.
“The good news is the follow-on product, Panther Lake, is internally sourced on [Intel’s own process] 18A and has a much-improved cost structure,” says Zinsner. Lunar Lake is coming as soon as this September. Panther Lake will start ramping in the second half of 2025, but the “huge volume benefits” of that chip won’t come until 2026, says Gelsinger.
On server chips, Gelsinger says Intel is “having to fight to win sockets” away from AI chipmakers but that Intel’s own Granite Rapids Xeon server processors are looking “very positive.”
Intel plans to reduce spend by billions each year. Here’s how it’ll begin.
Image: Intel
Intel previously had a big round of layoffs in October 2022, when it also announced it would cut between $8 billion and $10 billion in costs every year through 2025. But the company didn’t shrink all that much as a result. While headcount dipped roughly 5 percent in 2023 (from 131,900 employees to 124,800 employees), Intel hired its way back to 130,700 employees as of March 30th, 2024, its financial records show.
Intel says it’ll complete the majority of the layoffs it’s announcing today by the end of 2024, and spokesperson Penelope Bruce confirms that they are new layoffs — the 4 percent dip from 130,700 employees in March to 125,300 employees in June is not included in the total.
Gelsinger writes that Intel will offer a “companywide enhanced retirement offering for eligible employees” and let employees broadly apply for voluntary layoffs starting next week — not every employee departure will come as a painful surprise.
Intel says it’s now restructuring, suspending its dividend, and spending less, period, but will “maintain its core investments to execute its strategy and build a resilient and sustainable semiconductor supply chain in the U.S. and around the world.”
Here's the full memo from Gelsinger:
Team,
We have moved our All Company Meeting to today, following our earnings call, as we are announcing significant actions to reduce our costs. We plan to deliver $10 billion in cost savings in 2025, and this includes reducing our head count by roughly 15,000 roles, or 15% of our workforce. The majority of these actions will be completed by the end of this year.
This is painful news for me to share. I know it will be even more difficult for you to read. This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history. When we meet in a few hours, I’ll talk about why we’re doing this and what you can expect in the coming weeks. In advance of that, I wanted to preview some of what’s on my mind.
Simply put, we must align our cost structure with our new operating model and fundamentally change the way we operate. Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both – particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.
These decisions have challenged me to my core, and this is the hardest thing I’ve done in my career. My pledge to you is that we will prioritize a culture of honesty, transparency and respect in the weeks and months to come.
Next week, we’ll announce a companywide enhanced retirement offering for eligible employees and broadly offer an application program for voluntary departures. I believe that how we implement these changes is just as important as the changes themselves, and we will adhere to Intel values throughout this process.
Why Now?
Since introducing our new operating model, we have taken a clean-sheet view of the business and assessed ourselves against benchmarks for high-performing foundries, fabless product companies and corporate functions. This work made it clear our cost structure is not competitive.
For example, our annual revenue in 2020 was about $24 billion higher than it was last year, yet our current workforce is actually 10% larger now than it was then. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it’s not a sustainable path forward.
Beyond our costs, we need to change the way we operate – something many of you shared as part of our Employee Experience Survey. There’s too much complexity, so we need to both automate and simplify processes. It takes too long for decisions to be made, so we need to eliminate bureaucracy. And there’s too much inefficiency in the system, so we need to expedite workflows.
Key Priorities
The actions we are taking will make Intel a leaner, simpler and more agile company. Let me highlight our areas of focus:
Reducing Operational Costs: We will drive companywide operational and cost efficiencies, including the cost savings and head count reductions mentioned above.
Simplifying Our Portfolio: We will complete actions this month to simplify our businesses. Each business unit is conducting a portfolio review and identifying underperforming products. We are also integrating key software assets into our business units so we accelerate our shift to systems-based solutions. And we will narrow our incubation focus on fewer, more impactful projects.
Eliminating Complexity: We will reduce layers, eliminate overlapping areas of responsibility, stop non-essential work, and foster a culture of greater ownership and accountability. For example, we will consolidate Customer Success into the Sales, Marketing and Communications Group to streamline our go-to-market motions.
Reducing Capital and Other Costs: With the completion of our historic five-nodes-in-four-years roadmap clearly in sight, we will review all active projects and equipment so we begin to shift our focus toward capital efficiency and more normalized spending levels. This will reduce our 2024 capital expenditures by more than 20%, and we plan to reduce our non-variable cost of goods sold by roughly $1 billion in 2025.
Suspending Our Dividend: We will suspend our stock dividend beginning next quarter to prioritize investments in the business and drive more sustained profitability.
Maintaining Growth Investments: Our IDM2.0 strategy is unchanged. Having fought hard to reestablish our innovation engine, we will maintain the key investments in our process technology and core product leadership.
The Future
I have no illusions that the path in front of us will be easy. You shouldn’t either. This is a tough day for all of us and there will be more tough days ahead. But as difficult as all of this is, we are making the changes necessary to build on our progress and usher in a new era of growth.
When we began this journey, we set our sights high, knowing that Intel is a place where big ideas are born and the power of what’s possible triumphs over the status quo. After all, our mission is to create world-changing technologies that improve the lives of every person on the planet. And at our best, we have exemplified these ideals more than any company in the world.
To live up to this mission, we must continue to drive our IDM 2.0 strategy, which remains the same: re-establish process technology leadership; invest in at-scale, globally resilient supply chain by expanding manufacturing capacity in the U.S. and EU; become a world-class, leading-edge foundry for internal and external customers; rebuild product portfolio leadership; and deliver AI Everywhere.
Over the past few years, we have rebuilt a sustainable innovation engine that is largely in place and on track. It’s now time to focus on building the sustainable financial engine needed to drive our performance. We must improve our execution, adapt to new market realities and operate as a more agile company. That’s the spirit of the actions we are taking – knowing that the choices we make today, as difficult as they are, will strengthen our ability to serve our customers and grow our business for years to come.
As we take these next steps in our journey, let’s not forget that there has never been a greater need for what we do. The world will increasingly run on silicon – and the world needs a healthy and vibrant Intel. That’s why the work we are doing is so consequential. Not only are we remaking a great company, but we are also creating technology and manufacturing capabilities that will reshape the world for decades to come. And this is something we should never lose sight of as we push forward in pursuit of our goals.
We’ll talk more in a few hours. Please come with your questions so we can have an open and honest discussion about what comes next.
Update, August 1st: Added more details from the earnings call about Intel’s expectations for its upcoming Lunar Lake and Panther Lake chips.
