The company's stock price plummeted by 26% to $21.48 in a single day, marking almost the worst drop in the company's 50-year history, second only to a 31% decline in July 1974. The stock price has fallen by 42% this year, with intense selling causing the NASDAQ index to drop by 2.4% and dragging down global semiconductor stocks.

Currently, the company's market value has fallen below $100 billion to $96.7 billion.

Financial reports are being criticized everywhere, and executives admit misjudgment.

This week, bad news for Intel has been relentless: including massive layoffs of 15,000 people, a suspension of dividends for the first time in 32 years, and disappointing financial performance announced on Thursday.

The most surprising part was its performance guidance. Intel said it expects revenue of $12.83 billion for the quarter, far below the consensus expectation of $14.4 billion. Revenue decreased by 8% year-over-year.

Intel's outlook for the third quarter is even worse, expecting revenue of $12.5-13.5 billion, a decrease of $1.2 billion from the same period last year. Profit margins are also weak, expected to be 38%, a year-over-year decrease of nearly 8 percentage points.

Analysts believe that Intel's main problem is that the company has not kept up with the pace in product development. Especially in the data center business, revenue was $3.05 billion, a year-over-year decrease of 3%, while analysts expected $3.07 billion.

Adversity is the mother of growth. In contrast, Intel's strongest competitor AMD has captured most of the market share, with data center department revenue more than doubling. New Street Research estimates that by the end of the year, AMD's x86 server processor business market share will reach 40%, up from less than 5% four years ago.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a conference call with analysts that the decision to produce Core Ultra PC chips that can handle artificial intelligence workloads faster led to the company's losses.

Other company executives admitted that they misjudged the speed of the company's sales and technological improvements."We are overly optimistic about revenue," said Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner, "We should have a deeper understanding of the direction the business is taking in this year."

What can turn things around?

Faced with an increasingly fierce battle for market share, does Intel still have a chance to turn things around?

Some analysts believe that it needs two products to succeed in the next 12 months: Lunar/Panther Lake and Gaudi 3.

Lunar Lake and Panther Lake are key products for the client business, which will accelerate AI performance and significantly improve the graphics performance of consumer and commercial laptops. Among them, Panther Lake is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2025, and company executives have said that this will be "a processor that is better than AMD products in terms of performance and energy efficiency."

Analysts say that Intel needs these products not only to maintain its customer base but also to motivate and attract them to buy new products at higher prices to increase profit margins in order to better compete with AMD and Qualcomm.

At the same time, Gaudi 3 is the third generation of Intel's Habana AI accelerator series, which is Intel's last hope for making progress in the data center AI ecosystem revolution.

Market Watch columnist Ryan Shrout believes that Intel's Gaudi product line has the technical strength and potential to make waves. It has a price advantage and a variety of architectural features that set it apart from standard GPU accelerators.

But if Intel's leadership fails to formulate a cohesive sales and marketing strategy for the latest two products, there may not be much time left for Intel.