Few companies are so invested in the PC business as Intel Corp., which derived more than 95 percent of its operating income from the market in the year just gone.

But you wouldn’t know it from Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s comments about the declining fortunes of the PC market, which he confidently brushed aside as nothing to worry about.

For those who aren’t up to date, global PC shipments fell by 5.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner. It was just the latest bad news in a long period of decline for the PC market, which was temporarily buoyed last year when Microsoft ditched Windows XP and forced numerous concerned businesses and consumers to upgrade to a more recent edition of its OS.

More worryingly for Intel, the sharpest decline over the last quarter was felt in the business desktop PC segment, which is one of the firm’s core customer bases. The news caused Intel to slash a whopping $1 billion from its revenue forecast last March, due to weak demand for business desktops and the reduced amount of Windows XP upgrades.

Looking forward, Intel doesn’t see much of an improvement in the short-term, even with Microsoft ready to roll out Windows 10 later in the year and give it away for free.

“We are going through another transition, Windows 10 upgrades and so on,” said Krzanich at the company’s annual shareholders meeting last week. “We’re seeing some quarter-to-quarter pushing, but we continue to take a view of our long-term forecast… the PC market should be flat to slightly down mid single-digits over the long-term.”

Nevertheless, Krzanich was quick to allay fears the decline might hurt the company’s bottom line, stressing that it was seeing big growth in other areas, especially in the data center. So much growth in fact, that Krzanich believes it will easily offset any further decline in PC sales. As Krzanich pointed out, Intel’s data center business grew by 18 percent last year, and he’s expecting it to become a $14 billion business by the end of this year.

“We look at it as our next big growth engine for the company,” said Krzanich of Intel’s data center business.

But in future, it will be more difficult to tell just how much poor PC sales are impacting on Intel’s bottom line. The company has effectively masked its figures with its decision to report PC and mobile sales under one banner, its newly-formed “Client Computing Group” that was, some analyst say, formed to hide its dismal performance in mobile. At the last count, Intel lost $4 billion in its mobile unit.

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