Case study: Intel Corporation 1968-2003 Essay

Intel operates in an industry, which is comprised of products involving high research and development costs, continuous product improvement and new innovations. The companies in the industry are having high economies of scale and are knowledge based. It helps both the service and manufacturing sectors in the growth process. Intel is positioned as a leading company with its ability to adapt to technological changes and its strong relations with other businesses who are major buyers of integrated circuits. The industry in which it operates is very competitive and comes with high risks as

From pioneering in memory DRAM semicon to exiting the low-margin DRAM market – Intel was primarily a Memory semicon manufacturer before it entered microprocessors in 1980s. Its added value in the memory industry in 1970s was very high because of its advances in MOS process to produce DRAM. However, with increase in competition and the advancement of Japanese conglomerates in the memory industry Intel was forced to play a chasing game to improve performance and reduce costs. In the mid-1980s, Intel’s market share in the core memory business was <1%, however it was continuing to invest in this domain. They finally exited the DRAM market, which was more of a cash burner with low-margins.

By the early 1980, Intel’s total share in DRAM was barely 1% and manufacturing was restricted to one fab out of Intel’s eight fab, where the Japanese semiconductor companies had captured nearly half of the world memory market. There are several factors that forced Intel to exit the DRAM market, those are the same lessons learned.

This case traces the strategic decisions of Intel Corporation which defined its evolution from being a start-up developer of semiconductor memory chips in 1968 to being the industry leader of microprocessors in 1997 when it ranked amongst the top five American companies and had stock market valuation of USD 113 billion.

This report discusses the case study ‘Intel Research: Exploring the Future [1], published in 2005 by the Harvard Business School. The discussion is divided into three different sections: overview, analysis and conclusion.

In the 1990s, one of the largest and most successful companies in the world was Intel. For PC business, Intel was a significant and beneficial hardware provider.

For years, AMD held the place of a distant follower of the large microprocessor market leader, Intel. Up to there, the competitor Intel led the market (with a “push” strategy) by creating consumer needs thanks to technological innovations. Those were linked with strong marketing campaign in order to facilitate a quicker adoption process of their new product line. However, in 2003, AMD change its traditional strategy to use a widely different one by switching into a blue ocean strategy. Indeed, AMD has changed course to become a “starter” firm. AMD has decided to launch at first its own brand server microprocessor range, called “Opteron” before one of Intel. At this moment, the firm made the decision to initiate the moves of server segment and therefore take heavier risks in term of investments, sales, pushing partners

In one and half month the single word of one mathematician has turned into a worldwide campaign against us. AMD, Cyrix, and Nexgen are benefiting most from these events. They proved to have become quicker in manufacturing clones of our innovative products. Given this shorter time to market, they may jump on this opportunity to deliver Pentium clones any time. Our strategy to stop competitors copying our new products was heavy patent protection for the Pentium brand, however if our brand image is continually damaged to such extent, that protection would not give us the competitive advantage we expected. Although we have been the chips of choice for most of users, with the current negative publicity, the competitors may find their niche and expand their market share. Cost of switching from one type of processor to another (for example from Intel to AMD) is not significant for computer manufacturers due to the modular nature of this product. We know that this flaw would not affect any significant portion of the personal users (about 3.7 millions chips sold). The business users with heavy calculation needs such as engineering and specifically financial sectors would

“Microsoft’s share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is extremely large and stable,” 2. “Microsoft’s dominant market share is protected by a high barrier of entry,” 3. “Microsoft’s

1. Discuss whether the analysts following Intel appear to have been influenced by any biases, both generally and in their reaction to Intel’s announcement in September 2000 (3 marks).

With Intel have very few substitutes in the microprocessor industry, it is it is most certain that current customers will not want to switch and use another company’s products. High switching cost presents low bargaining power to the customers mainly because it would be very expensive to switch to a competitor, and since Intel is the leader in the market, switching

• Open Architecture : OS – Microsoft, Microprocessor – Intel , reason, to encourage application developers and enhance Peripheral market

In your judgment is Intel a “monopoly”? Did Intel use monopoly-like power, in other words, did Intel achieve its objectives by relying on power that it had due to its control of a large portion of the market? Explain your answers.

Intel excels at top-down innovation, where highly differentiated components and electronics command a high gross margin relative to competitors, enabling faster design wins with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and development partners. This top-down innovation flow within Intel is so dominant, that the product design teams are significantly more productive than even the most advanced business process management teams (Segerstrom, 2007). Microprocessors and the follow-on Internet, networking, security and integrated motherboard products are all predicated on this top-down innovation cycle that leads to product line proliferation in Intel (Zimmerman, 2010). DRAMS were undifferentiated in structure, lacked industry standards that could create differentiated performance or compatibility based on adherence or alignment to standards or customer requirements (Nicholson, 1997). Intel chose to compete on the only other area of their core strength as a company, which is quality management and yield levels (Clark, Walz, Turner, Miszuk, 1993). Getting the yields for DRAMS to 60%, which for a brief period of time lead the global industry, only served to accelerate a very high level of commoditization in the industry (Voss, 1998).

And these analyses will be done with the help of Porter’s 5 forces (see appendix 1, 2, 3). This analysing toll deals with issues which are from outside the industry that impacts the nature of competition within the certain industry. Thurlby, (1998) stated “Understanding the nature of each of these forces gives organisations the necessary insights to enable them to formulate the appropriate strategies to be successful in their market”1. The analysis of the three industry are given belowPC industry (See appendix 1) This competition within the PC industry is extraordinarily high consisting with top companies like Dell, HP, Apple, Gateway and Sony. In order to gain competitive advantage, the key factors are advancement in technology, custom built PCs, reliability and standard customer service. The life cycle of PC industry can be seen as mature (See appendix 6); however the growth of PC’s has not decline. The reason is due to the globalisation trends taking place within the major firms. The barriers very high where there are already five main firms that dominate the market. Therefore, the chances of new PC companies entering the market and get significant hold of market share is very slender. The main two factors that are making the entry level high are mainly cost and distribution and the top five firms also control 70 per cent of the global personal computer market. Another factor may be is that