Intel stock rose nearly 4 percent after the company released better-than-expected earnings for the fourth quarter of 2017 on Thursday. The company will hold a conference call with analysts at 5 p.m. Eastern time.
Analysts are expecting:
- EPS: Excluding certain items, $1.08 in earnings per share vs. $0.86 in earnings per share as expected by analysts, according to Thomson Reuters.
- Revenue: $17.05 billion vs. $16.35 billion as expected by analysts, according to Thomson Reuters.
The company has faced pressure around its handling of the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, which were disclosed on Jan. 3.
The issues affect chips made by several companies, although the Meltdown issue has had an especially large impact on Intel’s processors. On Wednesday, a House committee said it had sent letters to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and other tech leaders to learn about why Intel and other companies had withheld information about the issues for months before publicly announcing them.
“We think that 1Q18 guidance could be subdued as the recent Meltdown/Spectre bugs could result in an enterprise spending pause,” a group of Nomura Instinet analysts led by Romit Shah wrote in a Monday note.
In terms of guidance, for the first quarter of 2018 Intel said it’s expecting $0.70 per share, excluding certain items, on $15 billion in revenue, according to Intel’s earnings statement. Analysts were expecting $0.72 per share, excluding certain items, on $15.03 billion in revenue, according to Thomson Reuters.
Intel had a one-time charge of $5.4 billion because of U.S. tax reform. Intel is expecting a 14 tax rate through 2018.
In the fourth quarter, Intel announced that it had hired the head of AMD’s graphics business, Raja Koduri, and that it would begin making discrete graphics cards — an area where Nvidia is the market leader. Also, Krzanich sent employees a memo in which he said the company would take more risks.
Intel stock is down about 2 percent since the beginning of the year.
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