Intel announced Tuesday it would cut 12,000 jobs, or 11 percent of its workforce, by 2017 as the company restructures toward more high-profit areas like cloud.

Shares of the tech firm fell nearly 3 percent after the bell Tuesday, despite reporting better-than-expected earnings.

The company reported first-quarter earnings 54 cents a share excluding items, on $13.8 billion in adjusted sales. Analysts had expected Intel to report earnings of about 48 cents a share on $13.83 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters. GAAP revenues were $13.7 billion.

"Our first-quarter results tell the story of Intel's ongoing strategic transformation, which is progressing well and will accelerate in 2016," said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. "We are evolving from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices."

Most employees affected by the restructuring will be notified over the next 60 days, something that's not been taken lightly, executives told analysts on an earnings call. The technology company also said the chief financial officer Stacy Smith would leave his post to lead sales.

"We know that [this restructuring] is a very difficult thing, we know that there will be employees that are impacted by this and so it was a tough decision, but i think it's the right decision," Smith told CNBC's "Closing Bell" Tuesday. "We want to be able to have the conversation with the employees and we will roll that out more publicly over the coming weeks and months." What are shares of Intel doing? Track the stock here.



Intel's job cuts come as it tries to become more efficient while data centers and the Internet of Things overtake PCs as Intel's primary profit growth engines, the company said in a release. The company is slated to take a one-time charge of approximately $1.2 billion in the second quarter, but expects the job cuts to deliver $750 million in savings this year and annual run rate savings of $1.4 billion by mid-2017. "I am confident that we'll emerge as a more productive company with broader reach and sharper execution," Krzanich said in a statement. Tuesday's earnings mark Intel's first under a new financial reporting structure that plays up new revenue streams after client computing, the company's largest business, suffered declines. Intel's client computing group posted revenue of $7.5 billion in the first quarter, down 14 percent sequentially and up 2 percent year-over-year, the company said. That was below expectations due to a "weaker than expected PC market," Smith said in an earnings call with analysts. He said Intel now expects the PC market to decline in the high single digits in 2016, faster than prior expectations.