Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has again spoken about the global shortage of chips, which will disrupt the supply of laptops until 2023.
"Right now it's at its worst, every quarter of next year it will improve slightly, but the balance of supply and demand will only occur in 2023," Gelsinger said in an interview.
This scarcity makes Intel's revenue decline 2% in the Client Computing Group division, the division that oversees desktop and laptop chips. The decline was due to a 5% drop in laptop sales, which Intel said was due to laptop manufacturers not having enough components to produce more products.
A similar pattern of decline has appeared several times in other reports, and analysts have cited the scarcity of this component as the main cause of the decline in laptop sales.
However, according to Intel, the scarcity of this component does not only occur on the chip, but a combination of several other components.
"We may have CPUs, but they don't have LCDs or you don't have WiFi. Data centers are currently having the most trouble with power chips and some network and ethernet chips," explains Gelsinger.
Interestingly, despite the decline in the laptop sector, the desktop PC business is growing. Intel's revenue in this sector increased 20%, but the increase was not large enough to compensate for the decline in laptop sales.
The reason is that PC sales for almost a decade have continued to decline, precisely before the pandemic. Now during the pandemic, where many people are working and studying from home, desktop PC sales have actually increased, although lately the growth has started to slow down.
In total, Intel's revenue rose 5% year over year to USD 18.1 billion, driven by very high growth in the data center, internet of things, and Mobileye businesses.
