Intel Corp (INTC)

[highlandpk]

from the Intel CC:

Ambrish Srivastava - Harris Nesbitt

Hi, Andy. Just a clarification. I don’t get it, so please help me understand this. Your customers have excess inventory, you build inventory again. You are alluding to some minimal reserves next quarter, but yet you’re going to be building inventory. What areas do you think you’ll be building inventory in and what is the risk that there won’t be another larger write down in the second quarter? Thanks.

Andy Bryant

There is some risk. I don’t want to tell you there’s none. Remember what Paul said, though, about the way we’re using our factory right now. The 65 nanometer is building the new microprocessors that are going to be shipped in the back half. I don’t want to slow those down. I think that’s our future. The 90 nanometers transitioning into the chipsets, the Broadwater chipsets, are being used heavily there when again is our future. So we’re building the products, we’re certain are going to be there for the future.

Some of the stuff in the line today is some of the older products that have to be there in case you have a product slip or something happens and you need to ship product. So there is some risk that in a transition, you build a bit of a bubble and you don’t need to ship that stuff. It’s a small risk. There are lots of places in this world you ship some product — essentially as good as most people’s in the world. So there’s, the task for us is to find places to put those.

As I said earlier, we did take modest reserves — and by modest, it’s believe me, it’s not a big number — in the first quarter because there were some products I looked at and said it’s likely these won’t be shippable. If demand slowed down and we had a choice between still shipping the old or the new, we’ll ship the new. So if you saw another step down in demand it might become an issue. If demand, if the market grows in the high single digits, you won’t see much change to the reserve portion.