Diving into Intel’s Regional Focus: How is the UK different to the US? What about Brexit?

In this industry, it’s very easy to fall into a lull that the North American market is blueprint from which every other commercial market is drawn up. In reality, each region and sub-region has its own foibles, from the types of customers in play, budgets customers can spend, and the requirements therein that might be unique to that region. Of course, within Europe there are several sizeable markets that aren’t like the North American market at all, and this year in the UK a lot of talk has been about how Brexit will affect business, supply, and revenue.

This week Intel UK held an open house for media and partners to demonstrate the latest range of Intel devices, mostly derived from Ice Lake notebooks, Project Athena devices, gaming laptops, and super desktop rigs that are sold in the market. Intel also paired that up with a number of presentations going over Intel’s strategy and how it plays out to the local consumer base. From my perspective, given that I’ve been to over a dozen equivalent events driven by the US PR teams, the presentations at this event approached a number of market issues in a very uniquely British way.

Based on my questions after the first few talks, the local PR team offered me some 1-on-1 interview time with one of the keynote speakers, Jeff Kilford. Jeff, having worked at Intel for 25 years, is a key spokesman on local client strategy. His background includes being the Director of Intel’s IT to managing the whole of the Client Computing Group in the UK. His work involves a lot of discussions with Intel’s place in the UK as it relates to consumers and commercial use cases, as well as retailers, OEMs, and local distribution and supply chain.

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