Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[langostino]

"subdued notebook demand"

More like Wall Street once again played the inventory scam. Intel NEVER said notebook demand was anywhere near the levels the Wall Street sales machine tried to infer. It was well known that the 2 quarters prior to introduction the Centrino chip were smaller than smoothed run-rate (because people put off purchase knowing Centrino was coming), and then the 2 quarters after introduction were well known to include not only "extra" sales carried forward from the previous two quarters, as well as the natural bump that comes from early adopters and the buzz.

The question was, how much of the big jump in notebook sales were baseline sustainable growth and how much was one-time only pent-up demand from previous quarters plus the natural spike that accompanies introduction of new products.

We're now finding out the answer was ... not nearly as much as Wall Street wanted to believe. Anyone daring to look into the numbers with any critical analysis KNEW this was coming.

And now all the penguins and lemmings will all go piling on.

p.s. not to mention, you had to be a real sucker not to see part of the ramp in Intel sales as inventory build and channel fill as they expanded out the size of the channel pipeline to accomodate higher run rates.