Intel releases corporate responsibility report
DESPERATELY SEARCHING for ways to make itself seem more wholesome in the court of public opinion, after embarrassingly having been found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour for the third time, Intel has published a Corporate Responsibility Report to highlight all of the good things it does when it's not too busy freezing competitors out of the market.
The report highlights all the wonderful stunts Intel has pulled to get publicity for addressing social and economic issues, the environment and education, and it promises to continue trying to distract the world from its dodgy business practices through more of the same in the future.
In rather banal, trite fashion, the huge chip firm promises to make "innovation and growth" a "strategic priority" in the next few years. As opposed to stagnation and shrinkage, we assume.
As if a full back-slapping report wasn't nauseating enough, Intel CEO Paul Otellini also chimed in to add a dollop of cheese to the mix, emphasising the importance of "engaging employees to apply technology and expertise to tackle serious challenges." After all, how can one go wrong by doing things that are good for business and benefiting the world? Sheesh, we don't know. Ask the EU. Or Korea. Or Japan.
"Despite today's economic downturn, Intel's commitment to corporate responsibility is unchanged," said Michael Jacobson, Intel's director of corporate responsibility, likely whilst mentally subtracting $1.45 billion from the corporate salary budget.
Jacobson added that the future will bring a number of opportunities for Intel to be a good corporate citizen, waxing lyrical about global challenges such as climate change, the digital divide and "access to quality education and health care."
Key highlights in Intel's 2008 report included having trained six million teachers worldwide to teach kids about Intel products, an Intel Foundation IOU for $120 million towards maths and science over the next decade, support for foreign education and the deployment of Intel classmate PCs in 46 countries, where presumably the not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) can now pack up and go home.
Environmentally, Intel wants you to know it has bought itself outstanding green credentials which it has had printed up on recyclable paper and framed. Chipzilla boasts that its purchase of $1.3 billion in renewable energy certificates (REC) back in January 2008 makes it the largest purchaser of green power in the US, although the amount of power that represents is less than 47 per cent of the firm's electricity use.
Buying RECs, incidentally, also works out a whole compost load cheaper for Chipzilla than choosing green technology to meet its insatiable appetite for power. But it's nice to know Intel cares, even if it doesn't care quite as much as Google, which invests directly and heavily in renewable energy sources to meet its future power needs.
A rather alarming statement in the report claims Intel has "reduced its freshwater needs by three billion gallons per year". Reduced by three billion gallons?! What on earth was it reduced from, 300 billion?
Intel also claims it will be investing "over $5 million on more than 30 projects in an effort to save at least 30 million kWh of electricity and 750 therms of fossil fuel each year in operations." First one to get out their calculator and solve what that might actually mean wins a prize. The company also waffles on about being "on track to meet the goal of reducing absolute emissions 20 percent by 2012 from a 2007 baseline," an annual improvement of just four per cent.
Something truly noteworthy in the report, however, is its statement that 54 percent of Intel's employees donated 1,346,471 hours of community service to schools and nonprofit organizations in over 40 countries last year. What the other 46 per cent were doing while most of their colleagues were out helping others is beyond us, but it is an admirable statistic all the same.
Also worth a mention is that the Intel Foundation shelled out $8.5 million in matching grants for schools and nonprofits in need of funding.
So, no, it's not all bad Intel, but Chipzilla still has a ways to go before the bitter taste of antitrust might disappear. µ
See Also
We take a closer look at Intel's "green" power
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Well I'm not able to comment about how much other tech companies donate to education and society, the amounts mentioned are pretty small in relation to intel's profits. I'm opposed to giving out handouts/bailouts but it would be nice to see large successful companies do more to benefit society. I know it's not very capitalist but it's true all the same.
I don't know which book on capitalism you've read, Andrew, but you might consider reading one where the text isn't inside speechbubbles.
And if they are using 300billion, then that's 1bil gallons per day usage of "fresh" water.
Just what are they doing with that water, and is it a significant factor in parched Israel, where the next war is expected to be over water?
Here's the answer to "the other 46%". I worked at Intel for a decade and I had colleagues who contributed days and weeks to Habitat houses, or digging wells in Africa, or homeless shelters, et al. Just because we were already committed prior to arrival at Intel, and therefore did not "need" the Intel-organized volunteer structure does not mean half of Intel employees are schlumps. My guess is that this pattern exists at all major companies. Next time, before you extrapolate a snarky conclusion, throw a few more variables into your calculation. Thanks.
And it seems no corporate poetry will ever fool you! I love these dinosaurs as well, they're so comitted to making more money.
Sylvie - great job throwing out #'s and not even bothering to put ANYTHING INTO perspective.
Intel saved 3Bil gal of water.... how can I make that seem minisicule... I know I'll just make up a 300Bil # to make it look like 1%.... how about, gasp!, some research into what this cut is and how Intel's water consumption compares (on a normalized output basis) to the rest of the industry or other industries. Nah just making up a # like 300Bil to try to reinforce to readers that they should just assume this is a small % when not even knowing what the actual change is... is a much better fit for the tenor of the article.
As the other reader pointed out you shamelessly covered the volunteer work, and once again fail to put the # of hours of service into perspective.... on a per employee basis how does that compare to Samsung? or Sony? or IBM? or AMD? Nahh... let's just try to be belittle this too.
How about power consumption? How does this compare to using goats to mow the lawn inan unused field (like Google)? How does this compare to Al gore buying carbon offsets so he can fly around in a RIDICULOUSLY environmentally inefficient private jet? How does this compare to other companies. While it would be nice to stick solar panels on the roof to power the factories... they run 24 hours a day, and some are located in rainy areas.
Please Sylvie - do not become another Nick Farrell and just use #'s for the sake of the story while lacking the integrity to put the #'s (or facts) into perspective.
And is it not ironic that Intel's 'for profit' netbook is now price competitive with OLPC $150 laptop... and oh the infrastructure exists to actually build the netbooks while Ego-ponte's OLPC's are built with smiles and puppy's kisses. And is it not also ironic that Ego-ponte kicked Intel off the project when OLPC demanded that Intel not offer chips to COMPETING products or work with anyone on competing designs and Intel refused (is that not irony?)
@water hog,
I couldn't have said it better!!!!
Another big corporation kneeling in front of the climate change altar to try to earn indulgences with the general public. Problem is, less and less people are believing in the globalwarming/climatechange deity with each passing month.
Here is corporate honesty:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/14/now-thats-a-commencement-speech/
I completely agree. It's been like this for quite some time now from this author - all spice, no reports.
Intel has always been a kick-ass company. Now, it is time to kick their ass (like what EU did). They are “paranoid”, hence it is driving them to be “nice" for a change. This “water saving” figure is a lot of “smoke and mirrors”.
If anyone had bothered to RTFR they would have found out that the total amount of fresh water consumed by intel is running at 7.8bn gallons per annum and the 300bn wild assed guess in the article was way off. Reclaiming and reusing 3bn from 7.8bn seems pretty good to me (although an actual water expert might disagree) but the important point is that the real number is easily found in the report (in the Water Conservation section no less) so throwing in the fictitious 300bn gallons per annum number was just plain laziness .
As far as spending $5m to save "30million kWh of electricity and 750 therms of fossil fuel". The 750 therms is a bit odd - thats about 500 gallons of petrol give or take which isn't exactly going to change the world or Intel's bottom line, perhaps someone missed out a kilo prefix in there.
Spending $5m to save 30 GWh of electricity per annum is a good enough return on its own though - that's a saving of at least $3m per annum so the payback on that investment in purely financial terms would be around 18months.
They also state that previous investments of $23m have resulted in $50m total savings since 2001 so it looks like they have a reasonable record of spending money intelligently when it comes to greenery.
Why am I not impressed by Intel? I have seen them tweeting left and right about how they have spent their strong arm monopoly blood money to better modern society. I don't buy it.
Perhaps, I do buy the one about spending millions to improve math education, because they could use a few good numbers guys to determine how much to pay the OEM's and retailers to keep AMD off the shelf.