Fly Intel: What to watch in Intel's earnings report

Intel (INTC) is scheduled to report results of its first fiscal quarter after the market close on April 25, with a conference call scheduled for 5:00 pm ET. What to watch for: 1. REVENUE CONSENSUS LOWER: Along with its last report, Intel guided for Q1 adjusted earnings per share of 87c on revenue of roughly $16B. At the time, analysts were expecting the company to report EPS of $1.01 on revenue of $17.37B, but those figures have since fallen to 87c and $16.02B, respectively. Meanwhile, Intel said in its last earnings release that it sees fiscal 2019 revenue of about $71.5B. At the time, analysts were looking for FY19 revenue of $73.25B, but that figure has since fallen to $71.11B. 2. CFO CHANGE: Early this month, Intel announced the appointment of George Davis as CFO. Davis joined the company from Qualcomm (QCOM), where he had served as CFO since March 2013. 3. EXITING 5G MODEM BUSINESS: Last week, Intel said that it plans to exit the 5G smartphone modem business and "complete an assessment of the opportunities for 4G and 5G modems in PCs, internet of things devices and other data-centric devices." The company added that it will still invest in its 5G network infrastructure business and that while it plans to continue meeting current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, it does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launches in 2020. 4. GOOGLE CLOUD PARTNERSHIP: Earlier this month, Intel and Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership aimed at helping enterprise customers deploy applications across on-premise and cloud environments. The two companies said they will collaborate on Anthos, "a new reference design based on the 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor and an optimized Kubernetes software stack that will deliver increased workload portability to customers who want to take advantage of hybrid cloud environments." This collaboration is an extension of a technology alliance between the two companies, and the new reference design will be delivered by mid-year 2019 with expected solution delivery from OEMs and solutions integrators in market later this year. 5. GARTNER PC SHIPMENTS: Global PC shipments totaled 58.5M units in Q1, a 4.6% slip from the same quarter in the previous year, according to preliminary results by Gartner. "We saw the start of a rebound in PC shipments in mid-2018, but anticipation of a disruption by CPU shortages impacted all PC markets as vendors allocated to the higher-margin business and Chromebook segment," said Mikako Kitagawa, senior principal analyst at Gartner. Kitagawa also noted that supply constraints affected the vendor competitive landscape as leading vendors had better allocation of chips and also began sourcing alternative CPUs from AMD (AMD). The firm also said that the top three vendors, namely Lenovo (LNVGY), HP (HPQ), and Dell (DELL), continued to gain share in the PC market as scale becomes a bigger factor in industry dynamics. Intel's CPU supply constraint accelerated this trend, according to Gartner.