SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, reduced its first-quarter sales forecast, citing lower-than- anticipated demand for corporate computers and weakening economies, particularly in Europe.

Revenue is now expected to be $12.8 billion, plus or minus $300 million, the Santa Clara, California-based company said in a statement Thursday. The previous outlook had been for $13.7 billion, give or take $500 million.

The announcement signals the end of a corporate hardware upgrades that last year helped the personal-computer market's downward slide to stabilize. Intel's chips are in more than 80 percent of PCs, making its earnings a bellwether for the industry.

"People were expecting things to be weak, and there was a question of how much," Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., said in a telephone interview. "They tipped over the edge."

Intel dropped 3.3 percent to $31.25 at 10:30 a.m. New York time, its lowest value since October.

The PC industry, after peaking in 2011, has been on a steady decline since as consumers increasingly turn to tablets and smartphones as a means of getting online. That slump slowed in 2014 when corporations upgraded machinery to replace computers that used Microsoft Corp.'s obsolete Windows XP software.

Intel shares rallied 40 percent last year — compared with a 28 percent advance by the benchmark Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index — taking them to a more than 10 year high.

"Intel's performance all last year was based on the thesis that PCs were getting better," Rasgon said.

First-quarter demand has been hurt by small and midsized businesses upgrading Windows XP in lower numbers than expected and by "increasingly challenging macroeconomic and currency conditions, particularly in Europe," the company said in the statement.

The chipmaker plans to release first-quarter earnings on April 14.