Jim Cramer's Best Blogs

At the time of publication, Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust, is long AAPL, GE and SLB.

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You Won't Have Intel to Kick Around

Posted at 7:22 a.m. EST on Friday, Jan. 18

No, I won't.

I refuse to feel sorry for a company that generated $6 billion in cash flow for the quarter, that spent $2.5 billion for new capital equipment to stay ahead of the game and still paid out $1 billion in dividends. I am not going to cry over a company that had $11 billion in net income and had gross margins of 63% for 2012.

That's right, I refuse to feel any remorse for Intel (INTC) and its inability to hit it out of the park any more without very strong gross domestic product growth worldwide and customers that are able to do better than ones who use the other guy's chips. And this time it isn't Advanced Micro (AMD), but ARM Holdings (ARMH).

One could argue that you have to empathize with great American businessmen, premier manufacturers that simply can't grow fast any more, where low-single-digit revenue growth is becoming the norm and where you have to hope for a hockey-stick recovery in 2013 to get some real growth going.

Frankly, going into the quarter I expected more. Call me dated, but I thought the Windows refresh cycle would have more of a positive impact. Instead, Intel seemed to be hurt by the inventory clearance in older, Windows-7-based PCs. The burgeoning data center orders couldn't make up the difference.

Intel had also hung its hat on a huge ramp of the Ultrabook, but the tablet pretty much boxed that out. Plus, on the conference call Intel talked about the confluence of phablets (phone-tablet hybrids that are larger than smartphones, but smaller than plain old tablets) and how those are up-and-coming devices. Intel will have product for those markets and it lays claim to the mantle of offering the fastest and the lightest and the longest -- the usual superlatives -- with their new chips for that slice of the computing pie. In fact, it makes the point that Intel will have something for everything that is computing related that is competitive to anything anyone else has.

Good.

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