This is huge. They used to do anything to report a profit. I was part of the 2016 reduction and we knew it was for them to reduce sg&a. They offered early retirement to many high level (VP+) to get salaries off the books. We were always told Intel would never report a loss.
If you’re going to have a loss, or have to pull out all the stops to scrape by, just make it as bad as possible (jam everything bad you can into it).
Then you take all the pain at once, and from that point on everything will look better. People will say “look how far they’ve come since that $500MM loss!”
At least, that’s the theory. Especially handy right now when congress was debating (now passed) a handout to the industry.
