Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of Intel Corp., speaks during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Monday, June 4, 2024. Gelsinger took the stage at the Computex show in Taiwan to talk about new products he expects will help turn back the tide of share losses to peers, including AI leader Nvidia Corp. Photographer: Annabelle Chih/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Global semiconductor stocks fell on Friday after a lackluster set of results from U.S. chip firm Intel sent its shares cratering, and a global market sell-off weighed on tech names.
Intel shares fell 21.51% at 04:37 a.m. ET in premarket trade in the U.S. on Friday, after the company reported a big miss on earnings in the June quarter and said that it would lay off over 15% of its employees as part of a $10 billion cost-reduction plan.
In Asia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — known as TSMC — closed 4.6% lower in Taiwan, and Samsung was also more than 4% lower at the end of the session in South Korea. TSMC is the world’s biggest manufacturer of chips, while Samsung is the largest memory semiconductor firm globally.
Samsung rival SK Hynix, which supplies U.S. giant Nvidia, also fell sharply to close more than 10% lower.
The sell-off continued in Europe. Shares of ASML, which sells key tools required to make cutting-edge chips, were more than 6% lower at around 4:23 a.m. ET, in the Netherlands. ASMI, which also trades in the Netherlands, was off by 9%. STMicroelectronics and Infineon were both lower.
Intel’s results add to the mixed picture across the semiconductor sector, where companies like AMD and Nvidia continue to prosper from the boom in artificial intelligence. Other players, like Qualcomm and Arm, are not yet reaping the benefits of the technology in their financial results.
Adding to the pressure on chip stocks is a global equity sell-off that began in the U.S. and has fed its way through to Asia and Europe. This especially weighed on tech-heavy Nasdaq and on chip stocks.
The VanEck Semiconductor ETF, which includes major names in the sector, closed roughly 6.5% lower in the U.S. on Thursday.
A number of major U.S. chip names also fell on Friday in U.S. pre-market trade, with Nvidia trading around 3% lower.