After cutting 5% of its workforce in 2023 reports say Intel is planning to lay off thousands more workers

pcgamer.com:

Intel fired a pretty hefty 5% of its workforce in 2023. Now reports are coming in that the company is planning yet more layoffs this year.

Bloomberg reports these new cuts could be announced next week. Currently, Intel has around 110,000 employees. The report doesn't quote a specific figure, only saying that Intel plans to «eliminate thousands of jobs».

Still, anything measured in thousands will represent multiple percentage points of the existing workforce. Moreover, this news adds to the broader negative vibe at Intel of late, what with those crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, not to mention Intel's woefully inadequate response to the debacle.

As things stand, Intel still doesn't have a clear idea of all the reasons why those chips are crashing, it isn't recalling them, it hasn't stopped selling them, it won't say if warranties will be extended or how many chips it thinks has been damaged. Nice.

Bloomberg also reports that it expects Intel's revenues for the second quarter of this year to be flat compared with the same period in 2023, with the possibility that the company will begin show some signs of growth in the second half of the year.

Despite all this, Intel's share price actually ticked up following the report in after-hours trading late yesterday, albeit Intel stock is still down about 10% from a week ago or so, down 40% from a year ago and down over 50% from early 2020.

Presumably, the news of layoffs is viewed favorably in the sense that it signals Intel taking action to reduce costs and improve profitability. But it's still pretty hard to see where the positive narrative is with Intel right now.

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For clarity, let's recap the current state of play at Intel. For starters, the company has yet to really demonstrate that its chip fabs are back on form despite a grand plan to regain leadership in fab technology over TSMC. Its Intel 7 chips are really 10nm rebranded