Intel needs 'large' maker of smart-phone for mobile clip push

“ What we've learned is that you can't build a significant presence in the marketplace by winning a lot of the small guys, the rabbits,” Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said in an interview Wednesday. “If we're really on track, you should see announcements of real design collaborations with one of the big guys, or hopefully more, over the course of 2009 or early 2010.”

Intel, whose microprocessors run more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers, has struggled for about a decade to get a foothold in the market for chips that run phones. In 2006, Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini scrapped his predecessor's more than US$5 billion effort to crack the business after Intel was late to the market and failed to win enough customers.

Now Otellini is trying to sell a scaled-down version of the company's personal-computer processor in a bid to win orders for advanced phones like Apple's iPhone that can access the Web and send e-mail.

Otellini is targeting phones, a market bigger than PCs, to break Intel's reliance on computer chips, which provide more than 90 percent of its sales.

“ We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smart-phone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers,” said Smith. “We're lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line.”

Intel's entry into the phone-chip market would most likely come at the expense of Qualcomm Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc., the biggest makers of semiconductors that manage the communications and run software in phones.

Apple, Nokia and Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, dominated the 171 million-unit smart-phone market last year. A total of 1.21 billion mobile phones were sold globally, according to ABI Research in Oyster Bay, New York.

Intel, based in Santa Clara, California, rose 29 cents, or 2.1 percent, to US$13.88 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock plunged 45 percent last year.

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