Gadgetory

this is ben rubin with cnet i'm here with Intel's chief financial officer stacie smith stacy thanks for being here my pleasure so Intel the world's biggest chips company is coming off of a really strong 2014 revenue was the highest it's ever been stock went up 40 percent on the PC business which was down for a couple years actually rebounded last year so I wanted to start off kind of as a retrospective what worked in 2014 in pcs you know how did you guys manage the turnaround I'll just start by going a little broader it was more than pcs the company grew but it was broad-based growth we saw really robust growth in the data center so that business was up eighteen percent year-on-year and that's become a very large business for us and we saw fast growth rates in the Internet of Things business specific to the PC business what we're seeing is we're seeing a reinvention of the personal computer we're creating these very sleek cool devices that people want we're seeing you know at least that market stabilizing based on all the innovation that's going into it price points coming down so all of that led to a PC market where we saw some unit growth we saw some revenue growth so how do you guys keep that going this year our baseline forecast for 2015 is a PC market that's relatively flat you're on your and then but we still expect that the company will grow in the mid-single digits and that's based on growth in data center and out of things we're going to see a lot of innovation in the marketplace and what that means to a consumer is that they're going to be able to get devices that have extraordinary performance even longer battery life there's been a lot of talk over the past couple years about this concept of the post-pc era in Intel do you guys buy that and if you do where does that leave a company like yours the post-pc era as a market that's you know circa 300 million units with more innovation happening in it then I've seen it any time in my career in the industry today you just have this explosion of devices you can have a you know all in one with a touchscreen that you use in your kitchen you can have a convertible high-performance PC that you know maybe has a detachable screen that you use when you're on the road you may have a tablet you're likely to have a smartphone as well so you have these multiple devices that compute and connect what Intel is really well positioned to do is to be the company that provides the technology that's inside all of those different devices you bring up the idea of diversifying with mobile that's an area that you guys are trying to diversify into but so far I'm trying to be nice here it's been a bit of a mess so far in 2014 you guys lost 4.2 billion dollars in mobile is there a point where that becomes too painful you're not going to be doing this business anymore we expect that this year will make a substantial improvement in the profit rule of that segment we won't get it to profitable but we'll make a substantial improvement and profitability but if you zoom out in our strategies to participate across this wide range of devices ranging from you know high-end PC all the way down to a phone and we think that we're one of the only companies that has you know our own factories all of the different kinds of intellectual property blocks that go into those devices at CES Intel came out with a tiny tiny chip called the Curie which is for wearables how big of a market do you think that's going to be for Intel no idea you know I think there's probably two mega trends that have been playing out over the last five years and I think will be the dominant forces over the next five years one is that technology is becoming more personal and the second is that technology is becoming more mobile so it's becoming smaller with with longer battery life I think Curia is a great proof point of how that can evolve in you know what that was was in essence a fully capable computer that can connect that was in the size of a button and so you start thinking about the kinds of applications that has there's a lot of different places that can play what we see in that segment of the market the Internet of Things is it's a very chaotic segment there's lots of innovation going on it's if anybody tells you they know what's going to be the the winner of three years from now they're making it up because nobody knows and so we want to be there early want to be early with great technology and then let this delightful chaos play out and kind of see what a balls from there great Stacey thanks so much for answering my questions this is ben rubin with CNN thanks very much for watching