Intel chief says it's Thursday, analysts agree

Intel chief Craig Barrett yesterday admitted his company was carried away by the wave of optimism over technology stocks last year and suffered as a result.

However, the CEO insists that Intel is still in a strong position for growth over the next twelve months.

Speaking in London for the first time in two years, Barrett said he hoped to see an improvement in the market by late third or fourth quarter.

"We're looking for some seasonality that should give us an up-tick but that's going on speculation and feeling without any hard data. We're just bouncing around on the bottom at the moment."

Europe has been relatively unscathed by the economic turndown caused by the dot-com fallout.

"Europe was not involved in the dot-com mania to the extent that the US was. If the US has pneumonia then Europe has the sniffles," he said.

However, the UK is leading the march on the digital economy encouraged by continued investment and regulatory moves such as unbundling the local loop.

Broadband, said Barrett, is the way forward for the new economy now that the dot-com boom has gone bust.

"Everything rests on that big fat pipe," he concluded.

However, the Intel chief also admitted that his own company was a victim of the dot-com hype.

"We did get caught up in the explosion of the internet. But we have now backed off from those unrealities to focus on our core foundation of integrated circuits and digital computing and communication architectures."

Intel's decision to close a networking fab in Denmark today and one in the US sparked speculation that the company was pulling out of the high end networking hardware business.

Barrett was quick to quash this speculation. He said that despite the current economic condition the company planned to increase its R&D spend by several hundred million dollars from last year's figure of $10bn.

"Technology does not realise a slow down in the market. It just keeps wading forth at its own pace and you have to keep investing regardless.

"Intel will invest $4.2bn on new product development and $7.5bn in manufacturing this year. But those figures are not that big in the greater scheme of things."

The future is still bright for Intel, he claimed predicting that the launch of Microsoft's Windows XP and its .NET architecture would boost sales figures.