Who cares if your company falls behind in its main line of business if you can borrow a lot of money and buy back your stock to keep its price going up, especially when you have lots of stock options? From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
“We will not be anywhere near as focused on buybacks going forward as we have in the past”: Intel’s new CEO.
US semiconductor manufacturing has declined to where it is now only 12% of the world’s total, said Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger in an interview with CBS on 60 Minutes. “And anybody who looks at supply chain says, ‘That’s a problem.’” It’s a problem, he said, “because relying on one region, especially one as unpredictable as Asia,” where 75% of the chips are made, “is highly risky.”
And Intel, which made $63 billion in net income over the past three years combined, “has been lobbying the US government to help revive chip manufacturing at home – with incentives, subsidies, and-or tax breaks, the way the governments of Taiwan, Singapore, and Israel have done,” Gelsinger said. This lobbying came after Intel had incinerated $84.5 billion in share buybacks since 2011 (data via YCharts):
The success of Intel’s lobbying became clear in late March when the White House unveiled $50 billion in subsidies for semiconductor makers in the US to address the shortages and US exposure to foreign chip makers, as part of its $2 trillion infrastructure plan. The subsidies for the semiconductor industry have bipartisan support in Congress, the White House said. Corporate subsidies have nearly always bipartisan support.
