Intel’s Troubling Price Cuts

By William Trent, CFA of Stock Market Beat

We have written many times on both the general oversupply condition building in the semiconductor industry and in particular the battle between Intel (INTC) and AMD in the PC processor space. That latter topic resurfaced as a concern when we saw that Intel unexpectedly cut prices on its quad-core processors:

With the big Thanksgiving weekend in full swing, we are taking one more snapshot of processor etail pricing before the holiday shopping season officially enters the feverish final month. The chart kept some flexibility this week with the most significant changes happening on the very high end: The average price of Intel’s QX6700 CPU dropped $99 from last week.

Since AMD has no direct competitor to Intel’s quad-core design, it is somewhat troubling that Intel would be lowering the price so early.  It is one thing to have aggressive price cuts in older designs in order to clear out inventory. It is quite another thing to discount the latest and, presumably, greatest products.

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