Intel CEO on layoffs: 'Hard but necessary decisions'

A week after Intel Corp. started making what will amount to 227 job cuts at its Rio Rancho plant, company officials expressed optimism in a corporate earnings call about how the company's internal reorganization is going.

"We have much work to do in building a clean and streamlined organization, which we have started in earnest and has remained an area of focus for me," Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said during a second-quarter earnings call Thursday.

Intel reported $12.9 billion in revenue for its second quarter, which was $1.1 billion above initial projections, according to the earnings call.

Tan said Intel completed the "majority of actions needed" in the second quarter to achieve its end-of-year target of 75,000 employees. Last year, Intel employed 108,900 people worldwide, according to Stock Analysis, and over 3,000 people in New Mexico.

"These were hard but necessary decisions," Tan said of the layoffs. "These actions are necessary not just to reduce our operating expenses, but to make the company more agile, collaborative and vibrant, to simplify our business and improve our product and process execution."

Tan, who was appointed as CEO in March, announced in April that Intel would be making nationwide cuts following last year's 15% reduction of its workforce.

After weeks of speculation regarding whether New Mexico would be impacted, the company filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification in July. According to documents obtained by the Journal through an Inspection of Public Records Act request, the chipmaker began local layoffs on July 15 that will continue through September.

Moving forward, Intel committed to company-wide changes like removing burdensome workflows and organizational complexity, reducing costs and streamlining processes.

Over the last three months, Tan said he completed a systematic review of organizations and functions reported to the CEO. This included employee head counts, skill sets, spending, site distribution, executive population and restructuring plans, he said.

Looking ahead to the third quarter, Tan said Intel's goal is to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, as well as increase accountability at every level of the company. Intel projects generating around $13 billion in revenue for its third quarter, according to the earnings call.

"We need to right size and scale back the company while ensuring that we are retaining our best internal talents and hiring the best external talents from industry and universities," Tan said.

Shares of the company closed at $22.63 on Thursday, down 3.6%. Intel's stocks have jumped about 12% so far in 2025, but remain down 28.6% compared to one year ago.