Posted on Thursday, October 02 2008 @ 6:42 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel chairman Craig Barrett
told journalist that despite the harsh economic climate, the chip giant will continue to invest in products and technologies.
"I think you'd have to be prudent and assume that if the financial marketplace melts down there's going to be some impact but nobody's predicting that, nobody knows how big it's going to be," Chairman Craig Barrett told Reuters journalists.
"The only thing we can do is look at that part of our future destiny that we can control, and that's our investment in the future, in the products we create and the technologies we create," he said on a visit to Reuters.
"We've always had the attitude that you have to make that investment in good times and bad," he said. "It's R&D, capital, marketing-intensive, and we're just like a blind greyhound, we just continue to race down the track."
Of its $38.3 billion 2007 revenue, the world's biggest chipmaker spent $5.8 billion on research and development and $5 billion on capital items such as property, plants and equipment.
"You can't save your way out of a recession, you have to invest your way out, and so we've always kept a rainy day plan to accommodate that," Barrett said, adding that Intel had a financial cash cushion of about $10 billion for that purpose.
Barrett said Intel's creditworthiness meant it should be able to make acquisitions if the chance arose, even given the current turmoil in financial markets.
Barrett said Intel has the capability to make strategic investments in non-core areas such as mobile broadband, low-power chips for handhelds, high-performance chips and digital medical electronics. He ruled out NVIDIA, not because they aren't interested but because of antitrust issues.
