Intel crushes Q1 earnings expectations, forecasts strong Q2 revenue, shares soar
Intel shares surged in after-hours trading Thursday after the semiconductor giant reported much-better-than-expected Q1 earnings and sales numbers, and robust guidance for Q2.
Intel reported:
Q1 revenue of $13.6 billion vs. a consensus expectation for $12.42 billion.
Adjusted earnings per share of $0.29 vs. the $0.02 consensus estimate from FactSet.
A forecast for Q2 sales of between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion vs. analysts’ $13.11 billion expectation.
A forecast for adjusted Q2 EPS of $0.20 vs. Wall Street expectations for $0.10.
“The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic. This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in the company’s earnings release.
The quarterly result was clearly a surprise both to analysts and investors. Shares were up 15% shortly after the report in after-hours trading — that despite having risen roughly 50% already in the month of April before the results were released.
Intel’s results could not be more different from the previous quarter. In its Q4 report, Intel issued lackluster guidance for Q1, which it blamed on a dearth of available silicon wafers it could use to make finished chips. The stock plunged 17% the next day.
“Intel was explicit on the Q4 call that they were living hand-to-mouth on wafers,” said Cody Acree, senior semiconductor analyst at brokerage firm Benchmark/StoneX, in a brief phone interview with Sherwood News Thursday. “If this kind of upside was possible, than why the ultraconservative guidance?”
The Q1 results are a significant coda to what has been one of the best periods of share price performance for the company in decades. The stock has more than tripled over the last 12 months.
That run-up, however, had seemed to far outpace Intel’s actual business results, resulting in a nosebleed-inducing forward price-to-earnings valuation of nearly 100x expected earnings over the next 12 months, dwarfing even the valuations the company was receiving during the peak of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. But the Q1 numbers suggest the market was picking up good vibrations that seem to have been born out.
