How Intel’s India business is an outlier amidst global hailstorm

Global chipmaker Intel has been beset with declining PC sales, mounting competition from peers like Nvidia and shrinking IT spends that punctured its topline last year. 
 
Intel’s revenues skid by a fifth globally in 2022 and if things in the first three quarters of this year are taken as a signal, the revenue of chipmaker is likely to shrink by a fifth again in the current year that would take its topline to the same level it was a decade back. 
 
But its India operations appear to be bucking the trend of its parent, information compiled by data research platform VCCEdge, shows. 
 
If we deep dive into how Intel has been performing in India since FY06, it is a story of 2-3 years of burst in business followed by slow growth track for a similar patch where the firm posted single digit sales growth to low double digit rise. This is arguably explained by technology lifecycle where its chips are replaced by new generation products every few years. 
 
The trend was partly broken between FY17-20 when for four straight years it clocked 20% plus growth in the country, including an over 50% jump in FY18.

The firm did decelerate to 12% growth in FY21 but again broke the long-term trend to quickly bounce into a nearly 30% growth in FY22, followed by 25% rise in the year ended March 2023. 
 
In a nutshell, while Intel globally is likely to end 2023 with same revenues in 2014, the chipmaker’s Indian arm will be 7-8 times what it was. 

Intel spokesperson did not offer a comment till the time of publishing this report. 

Meanwhile, Intel that is set to launch 5th Gen Xeon processors and Intel Core Ultra processors next month and recently announced the general availability of Intel Developer Cloud for building and testing high-performance applications, has had a change in reins recently. 

Nivruti Rai, who has been at the helm of affairs, resigned in June after a 29-year-long stint across several roles including design engineer, vice president, and finally the country head. The chipmaker elevated Gokul Subramaniam to the post of Intel India President. He is now responsible for the company’s overall engineering and design operations in the country. 

Intel had named Santosh Viswanathan as the Managing Director-Sales, Marketing and Communications Group (SMG) for the company’s India unit last year. The role was previously held by long time Intel executive Prakash Mallya.