A leaner Intel sells off more of its assets
Intel today sold off more of its optical platform to Emcore, continuing on with a strategy of dumping unprofitable assets and activities that detract from its core business.
Today's sale includes the enterprise and storage assets of Intel's optical storage unit, as well as its Connects cables business, to Emcore, a fiber optics networking supplier in Alburquerque, New Mexico. Last December, Intel sold Emcore the telecom portion of its optical platform.
Intel began moving into a number of different areas of the communications industry back in the 1990s, but the chip maker failed to make much money there.
In an earlier round of sell-offs in 2006, Intel unloaded its media and signaling business to Eicon Networks and production rights to its XScale chip set -- which has been used in mobile devices such as RIM BlackBerrys and the Palm Treo -- to Marvell.
Fast forwarding to 2008, at the end of March, Intel finally started to sidestep out of the flash memory business directly with the announcement of Numonyx, a joint venture between Intel, Francisco Partners, and European-based STMicrolectronics. Intel is expected to transfer much of its assets in both NOR and NAND flash to Numonyx.
Many industry analysts at the time had called upon Intel to make just such a move. Intel's NOR business caused the company "substantial losses over the past decade," said Israeli-based financial analyst Shlomi Cohen, in a note published at the beginning of March.
Meanwhile, Intel's partnership with Micron Technology around NAND, just launched last year, "had already blighted Intel's results by the end of the fourth quarter, and was one of the triggers behind the stock's subsequent collapse," according to the analyst.
Soon afterward, Intel CEO Paul Otellini told analysts at an investors conference in Santa Clara, CA that Intel was reassesing its level of investment in NAND.
NAND "will not be a drag on Intel." Otellini vowed. "We're going to fix it, or we're going to make sure it's profitable, one way or the other."