Intel’s best ever quarter points to renewed corporate spend

Positive signs

In its role at a tech sector bellwether, Intel offered some pretty good news to the rest of us yesterday as it revealed the best quarterly earnings in its history.

Not only has its revenue topped $10 billion once more but sequential and year-on-year gains have been entirely converted to profit - indicating the company is more efficient than ever too. This is clear in Intel's GAAP financial comparison which, it must be noted, does include the one-off $1.45 billion EU fine of a year ago.

Apart from indicating that lots of PCs are being sold, looking a bit deeper reveals that the biggest improvement over the previous quarter is corporate spend, with revenue for the data centre group jumping 13 percent sequentially.

"Strong demand from corporate customers for our most advanced microprocessors helped Intel achieve the best quarter in the company's 42-year history," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. "Our process technology lead plus compelling architectural designs increasingly differentiate Intel-based products in the marketplace. The PC and server segments are healthy and the demand for leading-edge technology will continue to increase for the foreseeable future."

But things weren't looking too shabby outside of servers either. The PC client group registered record mobile CPU revenue, while a sequential 16 percent jump to $413 million for the Atom CPU and chipset group shows we shouldn't write-off the netbook just yet.

Both Intel's earnings and its forecast exceeded analyst expectations and its shares jumped seven percent in after-hours trading as a consequence.