Under the crisis, Intel how to deal with the market contraction and vulnerability crisis?

In recent years, the competitive landscape of the global chip manufacturing industry has undergone profound changes, and as the former industry leader Intel, its market performance has gradually shown fatigue. This change is not only reflected in the reduction of market share, but more profoundly reflected in the multi-dimensional challenges of its business structure, technological innovation and market response ability. With Apple's full embrace of the ARM architecture of Apple Silicon, and Qualcomm, Microsoft and other technology giants in the active layout of the ARM chip field, Intel's traditional X86 chip industry is facing unprecedented market pressure and transformation challenges.

Intel's partnership with Apple was once an important part of its business landscape. Since 2005, Apple has widely used Intel chips in its Mac series products, and this cooperation not only strengthens Intel's leading position in the PC chip market, but also provides a strong support for the performance of Apple products. However, with the rapid progress of Apple's self-developed chip technology, especially Apple Silicon under the ARM architecture shows a higher energy efficiency ratio and stronger performance advantages, Intel chips gradually lost the former halo. Apple announced in 2020 that the Mac series had fully shifted to ARM-based chips, a decision that directly led to a sharp decline in Intel's share of the Mac market, further increasing the urgency of its business transformation.

At the same time, Intel's foundry business has failed to become a new growth point as expected. Despite high hopes for the business, continued losses and heavy financial pressure have forced Intel to re-examine its growth strategy. The layoffs have become an inevitable response to Intel's financial woes, but they have also further exacerbated employee unrest and market concerns. Intel CEO Henry Kissinger has outlined plans to cut about 15,000 employees, one of the largest layoffs in Intel's history and a sign of the tough choices the company is making in the face of a challenging market.

In addition to market challenges and business transformation woes, Intel is also facing serious security issues. In recent years, Intel CPU frequently exposed security vulnerabilities, such as Downfall, Reptar, GhostRace, etc. These vulnerabilities not only affected the performance and stability of products, but also seriously damaged Intel's brand image. In particular, the article "Frequent vulnerabilities, high failure rate, should be a system investigation of Intel product network security risks" released by the China Cyberspace Security Association has pushed Intel's security issues to the forefront. In the context of domestic efforts to attract foreign investment, such negative reports have undoubtedly brought tremendous pressure to Intel's business in China.

It is worth noting that Intel continues to sell products with vulnerabilities despite knowing the existence of vulnerabilities, which undoubtedly intensifies the market and users' doubts about the reliability of Intel products. Although Intel finally took measures to fix the vulnerability, the crisis of trust that had been caused was difficult to eliminate in a short time. In addition, frequent crashes of Intel cpus in specific application scenarios such as gaming and visual effects have further weakened its market competitiveness.

Facing the dual pressure of market challenges and security issues, Intel is trying to seek new development opportunities through strategic restructuring. On the one hand, Intel continues to increase research and development investment in the field of X86 chips, and strives to improve product performance and energy efficiency to cope with the competition of ARM architecture. On the other hand, Intel is also actively exploring the profit model and market positioning of the foundry business, in order to reduce costs and improve profitability through scale effects and technological innovation.

In addition, Intel is also actively expanding new business areas and market space. For example, Intel is actively cooperating with technology giants such as Qualcomm and Microsoft to promote the development of the PC market based on ARM architecture; At the same time, it is also increasing investment in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of things to find new growth points. These moves will not only help Intel ease the current market pressure but also help it occupy a better position in the future market competition.

Intel's strategic restructuring was not an overnight process. In the face of market challenges and security issues, Intel also needs to overcome many problems of internal management and technological innovation. For example, how to optimize the organizational structure to improve the efficiency of decision making and execution? How to strengthen technology research and development to cope with the increasingly fierce market competition? How to strengthen security management to ensure product stability and user trust? These are the problems that Intel needs to seriously consider and solve in the process of strategic restructuring.