Wednesday, December 4th 2024
Intel's CEO Role Could be Filled by Former Board Member Lip-Bu Tan
The search for a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Intel has begun following Pat Gelsinger's departure on Monday. And it is not exactly an easy role to be filled. The tech giant's board is primarily considering external candidates to lead the company through one of its most challenging periods. Among the potential successors is Lip-Bu Tan, a former Intel board member and semiconductor industry veteran. Tan, who previously served as CEO of Cadence Design, left Intel's board in August 2023 after disagreements with Gelsinger over the company's strategic direction. Despite these past tensions, Intel's board has reportedly recently approached Tan to gauge his interest in the position. The search for new leadership is extremely difficult, considering the requirements and massive problems the new CEO would face.
Coming at a critical moment for Intel, which has experienced significant financial challenges under Gelsinger's tenure, the new CEO would need to get the Foundry business to pick up and maintain a solid product roadmap. The company's revenue dropped to $54 billion in 2023, marking a nearly one-third decline since Gelsinger took the helm in 2021. Analysts project Intel's first annual net loss since 1986 this year, with long-term signs of recovery. Gelsinger's exit, which came after the board presented him with the option to retire or be removed, reflects growing impatience with the pace of his ambitious turnaround strategy. The company has appointed CFO David Zinsner and senior executive Michelle Johnston Holthaus as interim co-CEOs while the search committee works to identify a permanent replacement.
Source:
Reuters
Coming at a critical moment for Intel, which has experienced significant financial challenges under Gelsinger's tenure, the new CEO would need to get the Foundry business to pick up and maintain a solid product roadmap. The company's revenue dropped to $54 billion in 2023, marking a nearly one-third decline since Gelsinger took the helm in 2021. Analysts project Intel's first annual net loss since 1986 this year, with long-term signs of recovery. Gelsinger's exit, which came after the board presented him with the option to retire or be removed, reflects growing impatience with the pace of his ambitious turnaround strategy. The company has appointed CFO David Zinsner and senior executive Michelle Johnston Holthaus as interim co-CEOs while the search committee works to identify a permanent replacement.
20 Comments on Intel's CEO Role Could be Filled by Former Board Member Lip-Bu Tan
Pat has been pushing Arc. Arc has lost Intel a lot of money.
It is possible Pat wanted to push Arc harder to get an actually competitive product on the shelves in a competitive timeframe, or the board did, and the other believed it was a sunk cost fallacy.
It is unlikely that was the final straw but it is possible.
Most of their revenue comes from the server market, which has been going down YoY. Pat's plan was to make their foundries a huge part of the company, and apparently their focus was mostly there were the other parts received way less attention.
Given how their IDM plan hasn't panned out (at least yet), I believe that's were most of the issue came from.
The consumer GPU market, while high in volume, is not really that profitable, specially the entry-level segment (where Intel is fighting). They have way less margins than AMD and Nvidia (just look at the size of their chips), and Nvidia has clearly shown that the money is in the mid-high level segments while using those same chips for datacenters and profiting even more. Intel couldn't get a foothold at the server market with their GPUs, Gaudi has been killed, and we shall see how Falcon Shores will do.
The Intel board expected their CEO to show significant progress in less time than it's going to take to produce a rather ordinary part in a well defined process. When they say "it's going to be tough" they actually mean that their candidate will have to either negotiate a golden parachute for the inevitable failure that could put them on the path to recovery, or they are going to have to be given insane latitude in a gigantic company who disappeared into bureaucracy decades ago. Either way, whomever accepts this job is basically going to be a human husk in four years, but will financially be set for the rest of their existence.
All I can say is that if I disagree with someone, and then was asked to clean-up the mess that they made, I wouldn't allow the people who proposed that monkey's palm wish to forget that they were the ones who dug their grave, and if they wanted me back it'd require rectifying the decision making processes which led to this failure so I never had to deal with it again. That said...if the previous CEO was on the right track it'd show up as progress for the current one well before any of their changes could come to fruition...so the best outcome would be to have a couple more bad years before things started getting better. That's....discouraging when most companies don't really invest more than a quarter or two into the future.
I suspect it was because of the Raptor Lake failures.
tough times indeed..............