Intel Beats Q4 Revenue Forecasts With Top Line Of $13.8B, Misses On Profit With EPS Of $0.51

Today Intel reported its fourth-quarter earnings, including revenue of $13.83 billion and earnings per share of $0.51. Investors had expected Intel to earn $0.52 per share on revenue of $13.72 billion.

In regular trading, Intel eased under a percent. In after hours trading following its mixed earnings Intel is down several percent. In the quarter preceding, Intel beat expectations by 9 percent. The sharp decline in its share price in after-hours trading could indicate that investors had somewhat bearish takes on its quarter, and to have Intel fail to best that low threshold came as a surprise.

For the full year, Intel had revenue of $52.7 billion and net income of $9.6 billion.

Earlier this morning Best Buy reported weak sales, causing its share price to fall dramatically. It cast a pall over the consumer electronics market, a part of the economy that Intel competes in dramatically.

Early reads of Intel’s first-quarter projections have them in line with investor expectations.

The company noted “signs of stabilization in the PC” market in its note to investors. After a historically bad year for personal computers, market analysts are expecting a more mild decline in this calendar year, and a stabilization over the 300 million yearly unit mark. Provided that intel can carve out a growing niche in non-traditional devices, the PC market’s decline could be almost a rear-view issue for its revenue in coming years.

It’s important to note that Intel’s mostly in-line earnings could indicate a somewhat solid quarter for other PC market participants, such as HP and Microsoft. If Intel sold lots of chips, others might have sold lots of boxes. Its $110 million revenue beat could be viewed optimistically in that regard. However, it’s still too soon to tell how the larger consumer electronics market fared in the final quarter of 2013.

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