In my opinion, one the most reliable signs is when companies stop repeatedly investing into their product innovation. The moment they start behaving like an established behemoth (monopoly/oligopoly) and you see repeated stock buybacks and frequent layoffs, the end is coming.
This applies to most large, inefficient corporations that get too comfy with success and forget how to pivot fast, take risks, and fiercely fight for their place in the market.
Eventually, any organization that falls into this state, slowly stagnates into oblivion.
Intel has put literally hundreds of billions of dollars into R&D annually in the past decade. Last year alone it was more than $16 billion. That's one of the highest annual R&D spends of any company in the entire US.
Nvidia for comparison is less than half that per year.
There is this interesting phenomenon where people outside an organization view R&D potential as elastic. That is to say, there is always a positive return on investment for the marginal R&D dollar.
It is clearly not in the case or every company would have exponential growth simply by reinvesting in R&D.
In reality, it is extremely difficult to create growth from R&D at all.
>> The moment they start behaving like an established behemoth (monopoly/oligopoly) and you see repeated stock buybacks and frequent layoffs, the end is coming.
Add to that the suspension of the dividend, and the packaging of the FPGA business (getting ready to sell it?) and the reference to idle capacity - guess they can't even fill that with their foundry business.
One thing I've noticed is that predicting timing is impossible. You can see a company showing signs of impending failure and somehow stock price still increases for a while, or the company decays slowly over a very long time. This might be a good thing since a company may save itself in some instances.
The writing was on the wall for Intel more than 7 years ago.
By then:
- Intel's 10 nm node was known to be two years late and known to be plagued for many others while TSMC had already taken the crown for most advanced foundry on the planet
- Apple announced their work on phasing out Intel hardware completely for their own ARM SOCs
- AMD had launched Ryzen, back then a bit slower in single thread but already much more competitive in MT
- Supercomputers and crypto showed the ever increasing possibilities of GPUs for heavily parallelizable calculations and Intel had nothing to offer there
- Cloud providers building their own hardware on ARM
> I am convinced that the decay is often very slow. There are signs of impending failure and it frequently drags out for many, many years.
When Jobs contacted Otellini about having Intel fab an ARM chip for them and Otellini said no... That's probably about the time their fate was sealed. And that would've been around 2006. Yes, there were plenty of signs prior to that. For example: AMD needed a lot less engineers to spin a new processor rev than Intel did and AFAIK that's still the case.
> You can see a company showing signs of impending failure and somehow stock price still increases for a while, or the company decays slowly over a very long time
This applies to most large, inefficient corporations that get too comfy with success and forget how to pivot fast, take risks, and fiercely fight for their place in the market.
Eventually, any organization that falls into this state, slowly stagnates into oblivion.