Introduction to Our Business
Intel put the Silicon in Silicon Valley, and today our technology remains at the core of the most exciting, life-changing innovations on the planet.
We are an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. We stand at the brink of several technology inflections – AI, 5G network transformation, and the rise of the intelligent edge1 – that together will shape the future of technology. Silicon and software drive these inflections, and Intel is at the heart of it all with data emerging as a transformational force in this era where an explosion of devices permeates all our interactions. That data must be moved, stored, and processed faster and more securely than ever before. We are unleashing the potential of data to unlock value for people, business, and society on a global scale.
With a clear, shared purpose, we are inspired to create, innovate, and push the boundaries of technology. Our commitment to corporate responsibility and to creating an inclusive environment for our amazing people supports our ambitions and makes us stronger. When every employee has a voice and a sense of belonging, Intel can be more innovative, agile, and competitive.
1. Intel's definition is included in "Key Terms" within the Financial Statements and Supplemental Details.
This era of distributed intelligence plays to Intel’s strengths, and we are responding with the most diverse portfolio, greatest scale and strongest brand in the industry. I’m proud of the progress that we have made evolving our culture and sharpening our execution to deliver customers a predictable cadence of leadership products. Today, Intel is positioned to go to the next level of performance.
– Bob Swan, Chief Executive Officer1
1. Patrick Gelsinger succeeded Mr. Swan as CEO effective as of February 15, 2021.
Letter From Your CEO
When I joined Intel at the age of 18, I could not have imagined that I would one day have the honor of becoming CEO of this iconic company. After a 30-year journey inspired by the leadership of Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Andy Grove, and then a decade away, I have returned to Intel with great excitement and passion to take on my dream job. For the last eight years, I was CEO of VMware, where I had the privilege of re-imagining an enterprise software pioneer and leading it to new heights. I gained valuable insights along the way, but my experience at Intel has always been foundational to my thinking and close to my heart.
Read More
Letter From Your Chairman
2020 was a time of crisis and renewal for Intel, marked by the global pandemic, economic disruption, calls for action on social equity, devastating wildfires, and intense competition. Intel employees met the challenges with extraordinary energy, demonstrating again the resilience of the culture. Thanks to their focus and diligence, Intel entered 2021 with a renewed sense of purpose as well as a position of financial and strategic strength.
Read MoreA Year in Review
We achieved record revenue of $77.9 billion, with 49% from our data-centric businesses, amid the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The dynamic of work and learn from home resulted in strong demand for notebook PCs, while demand for desktop PCs weakened. Demand in the DCG cloud service providers market segment grew, while enterprise and government declined on macroeconomic weakness. We shipped a higher volume of 10nm products than we had anticipated at the beginning of the year. The increased mix of 10nm, combined with a higher portion of revenue from lower margin adjacent businesses, offset higher platform revenue and drove a decline in gross margin of 3 percentage points. We invested $13.6 billion in R&D, reduced our spending to 25.3% of revenue, and signed an agreement to divest our NAND memory business. We made capital investments of $14.3 billion, and generated $35.4 billion cash from operations and $21.1 billion of free cash flow. We also returned $19.8 billion to stockholders, including $5.6 billion in dividends and $14.2 billion in buybacks.
We achieved record revenue for the fifth consecutive year and maintained a strong balance sheet and liquidity position. Our results amid the challenges of a global pandemic and an uncertain economy reflect the importance of our technology and the resilience of our employees around the world.
– George Davis, Chief Financial Officer
Our Strategy
Our strategy is to play a larger role in our customers' success by delivering a predictable cadence of leadership products.
Read MoreOur Capital
We deploy various forms of capital to execute our strategy in a way that seeks to reflect our corporate values, help our customers succeed, and create value for our stakeholders.
Capital
Strategy
Value
Financial
Strategy
Leverage financial capital to invest in ourselves and grow our capabilities, supplement and strengthen our capabilities through acquisitions and strategic investments, and provide returns to stockholders.
Value
We strategically invest financial capital to create long-term value and provide returns to our stockholders in the form of dividends and buybacks.
Intellectual
Strategy
Invest significantly in R&D and IP to enable us to deliver a predictable cadence of leadership products that move, store, and process data at scale, and extend our reach to accelerate our growth.
Value
We develop IP to enable next-generation products, create synergies across our businesses, expand into new markets, and establish and support our brands.
Manufacturing
Strategy
Invest timely and at a level sufficient to meet customer demand for current technologies and prepare for future technologies as we evolve our IDM model.
Value
Our manufacturing scope and scale enable us to provide our customers and consumers with a broad range of leading-edge products.
Human
Strategy
Continue to build a diverse, inclusive, and safe work environment to attract, develop, and retain the talent needed to remain at the forefront of innovation.
Value
Our talented employees enable the development of solutions and enhance the intellectual and manufacturing capital critical to helping our customers win the technology inflections of the future.
Social and Relationship
Strategy
Build trusted relationships for both Intel and our stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, customers, local communities, and governments.
Value
We collaborate with stakeholders on programs to empower underserved communities through education and technology, and on initiatives to advance accountability and capabilities across our global supply chain, including accountability for the respect of human rights.
Natural
Strategy
Continually strive to reduce our environmental footprint through efficient and responsible use of natural resources and materials used to create our products.
Value
Our proactive efforts help us mitigate climate and water impacts, achieve efficiencies, and lower costs, and position us to respond to the expectations of our stakeholders.
2030 RISE Strategy and Corporate Responsibility Goals
Our commitment to corporate responsibility and sustainability leadership is deeply integrated throughout our business. We strive to create an inclusive and positive work environment where every employee has a voice and a sense of belonging, and we are proactive in our efforts to reduce our environmental footprint through efficient and responsible use of natural resources and materials.
We continue to raise the bar for ourselves and leverage our leadership position in the global technology ecosystem to make greater strides in corporate responsibility and apply technology to address social and environmental challenges. Through our new RISE strategy and 2030 goals, we aim to create a more responsible, inclusive, and sustainable world, enabled through our technology and the expertise and passion of our employees. This corporate responsibility strategy is designed to increase the scale of our work through new levels of collaboration with our stakeholders and other organizations; we know that acting alone, we cannot achieve the broad social impact to which we aspire. Details on the results of our 2020 goals and more information on our new 2030 goals are included in our Corporate Responsibility Report1.
1 The contents of our Corporate Responsibility Report are referenced for general information only and are not incorporated by reference in this Form 10-K.
Value We Create
Each of our six forms of capital plays a critical role in our long-term value creation. We consider numerous indicators in determining the success of our capital deployment in creating value. Highlights of value created in 2020 are as follows:
Our Products
We are at the forefront of developing new technologies and products as building blocks for an increasingly smart and connected world. These technologies and products are used as integrated solutions for a broad spectrum of markets.
We Have an End-to-End Product Portfolio
From processing to moving and storing data, our end-to-end product portfolio offers innovative solutions that scale from edge computing to the network, the cloud, and the emerging fields of AI and autonomous driving. Our products, such as our gaming CPUs, may be sold directly to end consumers, or they may be further integrated by our customers into end products such as notebooks and storage servers. Combining some of these products—for example, integrating FPGAs and memory with Intel Xeon processors in a data-center solution— enables incremental synergistic value and performance. We introduced new products in 2020 such as 10nm-based 11th Gen Intel Core processors, 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (previously referred to as Cooper Lake), Intel Atom P5900 processors for wireless base stations, a next-generation structured ASIC for 5G network acceleration, Intel Stratix 10 NX FPGAs, and the Intel Optane DC persistent memory 200 series. We are now shipping our 10nm-based 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (previously referred to as Ice Lake).
Platform Products: Our platform products can be a CPU and chipset, an SoC, or a multichip package, based on Intel® architecture that processes data and controls other devices in a system. These products are primarily used in solutions sold through CCG, DCG, and IOTG.
Adjacent Products: Our non-platform, or adjacent, products can be combined with platform products to form comprehensive platform solutions to meet customer needs. These products are used in solutions sold through each of our businesses and include the following:
- Accelerators - Silicon products that can operate alone or accompany our processors in a system, such as FPGAs for PSG, VPUs for IOTG, and Mobileye EyeQ* SoCs
- Boards and Systems - Server boards and small form factor systems such as Intel® NUCs for CCG
- Connectivity Products - Ethernet controllers and silicon photonics for DCG; and cellular modems, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth® for CCG
- Memory and Storage Products - SSD, persistent memory, and memory components sold through NSG and DCG
Our customers' success is our obsession. We are committed to delivering a portfolio of the best quality products, performance, and experiences to enable our customers to solve the world's most challenging problems.
—Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Sales, Marketing and Communications Group
- Data Center Group
- Internet Of Things
- Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group
- Programmable Solutions Group
- Client Computing Group
DCG develops workload-optimized platforms for compute, storage, and network functions. With unmatched scale, portfolio breadth, and ecosystem support, we are uniquely positioned to enable the world to unleash the potential of data, unlocking value for people, business, and society on a global scale. Market segments include cloud service providers, enterprise and government, and communications service providers. We serve the global appetite for cloud computing and enable transformation of the network and edge.
More industries are harnessing the power of data to create business value, innovate, and grow. This requires that intelligence move closer to the edge, allowing data to be acted on where it is created. Working with our partners, we are using our architecture, accelerators, and software to develop and scale a growing Internet of Things portfolio and ecosystem. Our Internet of Things portfolio is comprised of our IOTG and Mobileye businesses.
NSG provides next-generation memory and storage products based on breakthrough Intel Optane technology and Intel 3D NAND technology. NSG is disrupting the memory and storage hierarchy with new tiers that balance capacity, performance, and cost. Our products are available in innovative new form factors and densities to address the memory and storage challenges our customers face in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. Our customers include enterprise and cloud-based data centers, and users of business and consumer desktops and laptops.
PSG offers programmable semiconductors, primarily FPGAs, structured ASICs, and related products, for a broad range of applications across our embedded, communications, and cloud and enterprise market segments. Our product portfolio delivers FPGA acceleration in tandem with Intel microprocessors, which enables us to combine the benefits of our broad portfolio of technologies to allow more flexibility for systems to operate with increased efficiency and higher performance.
The PC is more essential than ever, enriching lives by helping people focus, create, and connect with friends, family, and coworkers around the world. Working with our partners across the industry, we intend to continue to advance PC experiences. As the largest business unit at Intel, CCG is investing more heavily in the PC, ramping its capabilities even more aggressively, and designing the PC experience even more deliberately, including delivering a predictable cadence of leadership products. As a result, we are able to fuel innovation across Intel, providing an important source of IP, scale, and cash flow.
Awards
Third-party ratings and rankings give us valuable feedback on our programs and practices, and helps drive continuous improvement over time. Below is a selection of the corporate responsibility-related awards and recognitions that Intel received in 2020.
- 3BL Media. 100 Best Corporate Citizens
- American Association of People with Disabilities and Disability:IN. Disability Equality Index
- American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Top 50 Workplaces for Indigenous STEM Professionals
- Bloomberg. Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index
- Brave Blue World. 2020 Lighthouse Award for Water Stewardship
- CDP. "A" Water Security Rating, "A-" Climate Change Rating, "Leaderboard" designation on the Supplier Engagement Rating
- Center for Political Accountability. CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability - Trendsetter Company
- Corporate Human Rights Benchmark - ICT Manufacturing top 10
- Corporate Knights. Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations
- Dow Jones Sustainability Index. North America Index
- EcoAct. Sustainability Reporting Performance of the DOW 30
- Ethisphere Institute. World’s Most Ethical Companies
- Fast Company. Best Workplaces for Innovatorsm
- Forbes. World's Most Valuable Brands
- Forbes. World's Best Employers, Best Employers for Women, and America's Best Employers for Diversity
- Fortune. World’s Most Admired Companies
- Fortune. Fortune Blue Ribbon Companies
- FTSE Group. FTSE4Good Index
- Gartner. Supply Chain Top 25
- Human Rights Campaign. Corporate Equality Index
- Interbrand. Best Global Brands
- ISS. 1 rating in both Environment & Social QualityScore1
- JUST Capital. Top Companies for the Environment
- JUST Capital and Forbes. JUST 100
- Labrador. U.S. Transparency Awards
- Minority Engineer. Top 50 Employers
- MSCI. World ESG Leaders Index
- NAFE. Top Companies for Executive Women
- Newsweek. America’s Most Responsible Companies
- RepTrak. Top 10 Most Reputable Companies
- Sustainalytics. Member, Global Sustainability Signatories Index
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Green Power Partnership National Top 100
- Wall Street Journal. Management Top 250
- Wall Street Journal. Top 100 Most Sustainably Managed Companies
- Women Engineer Magazine. Top 50 Employers - Reader's Choice
- Working Mother. 100 Best Companies For Working Moms and Best Companies for Multicultural Women
1. Score as of end of year 2020
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