Intel's fourth-quarter profit plunged 39% as the world's largest chip maker endured a painful price war with much-smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices and continued to pay for a massive restructuring, an Associated Press report said.
The Associated Press report also quoted Intel as saying that it sold record numbers of microprocessors and flash memory chips and the company managed to beat analysts' tepid expectations.
Intel said net income for the period ended December 30 was $1.5 billion versus $2.45 billion in the same period a year ago, the report said.
Revenue for the quarter was $9.7 billion, down 5% from $10.2 billion a year ago.
Excluding one-time charges, Intel said it earned $1.7 billion, beating analyst estimates.
Analysts were expecting the company to earn $0.25 per share on $9.44 billion in revenue for the quarter, according to a survey by Thomson Financial.
The company said it expected revenue for the first quarter of 2007 to be between $8.7 billion and $9.3 billion, and that gross margin for the full-year 2007 is expected to be about 50%, plus or minus a few percentage points.For the year, Intel said revenues were $35.4 billion, and it earned $5 billion.