Letter to our
stockholders
2001 was a tough year for the technology industry.
Most companies took a beating, and many investors wondered if technology
was dead. Our answer is a resounding no. The history of technology
revolutions is told in cycles of boom, bust, and build-out. Despite
the recent downturn, we are confident that we will see decades of
future growth in Internet-related technologies. Here at Intel, we
are staying the course. Guided by our vision of the ongoing digital
revolution, we continue to introduce new products and invest for the
future so we are ready to ride the recovery.

As 2001 progressed, it became increasingly
clear that the economy had drifted into a recession with worldwide
impact. Just as the high-tech sector had fueled the previously buoyant
worldwide economy, it also led the way into the slow business climate.
In 2001, the high-tech industry was characterized by high inventories
and over-capacity of component and system products. Parts of the high-tech
infrastructure had been built ahead of anticipated demand, leading
many companies to cut back on their computing and communications technology
expenditures in 2001. In addition, the dot-com collapse triggered
market declines that affected all areas of the high-tech industry.
All this made for a pretty bleak year for Intel financially. Revenue
for 2001 was $26.5 billion, down 21% from 2000. Including acquisition-related
costs of nearly $2.5 billion, net income for 2001 was $1.3 billion,
down 88% from $10.5 billion in 2000. Excluding these costs, net income
was $3.6 billion, down 70% from 2000.
Our sales came from an increasingly international market. We ended
2001 with nearly two-thirds of our sales generated outside the Americas.
For the first time in our history, sales were strongest in the Asia-Pacific
region. A growing distributor channel and strong processor and chipset
sales helped drive growth in Asia-Pacific, as it is increasingly becoming
the manufacturing center for the world-wide PC industry. Sales were
lower in the Americas and Japan than they were in 2000, reflecting
the worldwide reach of the recession.
In response to the global slowdown, we focused our efforts around
three key principles. First, we believe that, as in previous economic
cycles, great new products will lead the recovery. In 2001,
we accelerated our efforts to develop and introduce the prod-ucts
that we expect will help bring the industry out of the downturn. In
August, we introduced the Intel® Pentium® 4 processor running
at 2.0 gigahertz, or 2.0 billion cycles per second. With its unique
Intel ® NetBurst microarchitecture, the Pentium 4 processor
is optimized for a richer multimedia online experience. By years
end, we were building this chip on our new 0.13-micron technology
increasing on-chip memory while reducing processor size by nearly
30%.
We also continued to advance our 64-bit processor for high-end servers
and workstationsthe Intel ® Itanium processor. This
processor enables most data-intensive applications, such as enter-prise
resource planning and intensive graphics modeling, to run much faster
than they would on a 32-bit processor. In December 2001, our OEM customers
began shipping to end users their initial pilot systems based on our
next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed McKinley. We anticipate
that the McKinley processor will be generally available in mid-2002.
Our product roadmap acceleration efforts were by no means confined
to microprocessors. Our Ethernet products translate and transmit data
across networks. In 2001, we introduced and shipped in volume the
worlds first single-chip, 1-Gigabit Ethernet controller, which
operates 10 times faster than the previous industry-standard product.
Our Gigabit Ethernet solutions have been widely adopted. As of the
end of 2001, Intel products accounted for more than half of the Gigabit
Ethernet connections worldwide.
In flash memory, a critical ingredient of todays smart cell
phones and other handheld computing devices, we extended our leadership
by introducing the first flash memory built on the 0.13-micron process
technology. The new flash chip is nearly half the size of its predecessor
and also consumes less power.
Our second key principle: we know that a downturn is no time to
shy away from strategic spending. Though the high-tech industry
was mired in overcapacity in 2001, we know from experi-ence that capacity
wilts like lettuce. Theres always too much of yesterdays
technology and never enough of tomorrows. For Intel, tomorrows
manufacturing capacity is necessary to build the advanced products
we expect to help contribute to the recovery. Consequently, during
this downturn, we did what may seem counter-intuitive: we accelerated
our capital investments, spending $7.3 billion in 2001, compared with
approximately $10 billion in capital spending over the previous two
years combined. We also invested $3.8 billion in research and development
in 2001, mostly focused on silicon products and processes.
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