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Comment by kmoser | Hacker News Reader

"Loss" is accountant-speak for "we still made a profit, just less than last year."

That is not how accounting works.

However, it is true that a company can report a loss on it's P&L statement (due to non-cash expenses like impairments / write-downs, reserves) while they in fact did generative positive cash flow in that same period.

But the company is still profitable on the whole (even if their margins are not great these days) they basically just shifted some of the costs from one department to another

It's not. Operating loss is when expenses are greater than the revenue.

"Expenses" and "revenue" are rather fuzzy concepts in this case: Intel's foundry business (as in, Intel manufacturing chips for somebody else) is still mostly aspirational; almost all of the chips they make are Intel chips, and there's a lot of wiggle room for how much of the revenue from selling Intel-branded chips gets assigned to their foundry business vs eg. the Client Computing Group or the Data Center and AI division. If they were reporting Intel Foundry revenue only from outside foundry customers (they're not), then Intel Foundry would never be able to come close to profitability.

not your point at all, but you say almost all of the chips are Intel chips. I was under the impression that literally all of them were Intel chips. Have they started manufacturing chips for others?

Intel has been making a few outside chips on and off for years.

In a world where inter-company expenses [1] charging out for IP use, accounting & HR services, strategic direction etc. etc. exist, something so simple as expenses being larger than revenue being an accurate economic measurement is wholly unreliable at best. Intel market analysts will be starting with the statement of cash flows and reconstructing how they think it should all look from there using the financial statement footnotes and all their other research & knowledge.

[1] Frequently cross-border for tax purposes but there are plenty of non-tax reasons for filling and draining hollow logs.

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