June improvement may yet materialize, but it's not turned up yet and defending a sequential revenue increase is getting tougher. |
Just because Intel has faltered does not mean the company is now incapable of executing. |
One of the dominant worries here is the question of whether we're going to see any building of inventory that will result in 1Q weakening. But as the data points have rolled in, that appears to be less and less the case. That's pretty important, and you can see it, in particular, in some of the communications stocks that are moving. |
Texas Instruments' decision to buy analog specialist Burr-Brown fits well with the company's stated objective of building its presence in the analog business. Despite the somewhat rich valuation for the deal, we think that the deal makes sense for TI. We reiterate our intermediate-term and long-term buy ratings for the stock. |
The clock-speed wars have gotten to the point where it's not clear who benefits. It's certainly not the customer who wants to buy 700 MHz stuff at reasonable prices. It has been a problem, but availability has improved over the past four weeks or so. |
The concerns that underpinned our mid-cycle correction thesis are beginning to dissipate, and semiconductor stocks globally are well below their March highs. We would advise investors to begin buying semiconductors more aggressively. |
The disappearance of Vista from the holiday 2006 selling season is likely to have a bigger impact on semiconductor companies than a simple few-week delay might imply. |
The rate of decline for both the flash memory and communications business in the second quarter could be more dramatic than the overall top line, leaving it to the microprocessor business to pick up the slack. |
The reason I am positive on the stock right now is the fact they are pushing into servers, workstations -- the things that are being driven by growth in the Internet. That is a big market that Intel can dominate, I think, pretty quickly. |
The semiconductor sector in general is in very good shape; the industry hasn't invested enough in capacity and that is actually very good for chip makers. Intel is often treated as a proxy for the chip sector, so the chip sector is doing well and so is Intel. |
They have a pretty good idea at this point what they're going to ship. |
Valuation for the stock appears significantly high for a company with a sustainable earnings growth rate of 10 percent to 15 percent. We have difficulty imagining any second-half recovery that could raise earnings, and investor expectations, to a level sufficient to keep the stock moving up. |
We admit to some difficulty in seeing what supports consensus earnings estimates. |
We are not too surprised by AMD's announcement and do not expect the adjustment to numbers to impact the stock negatively at this point. Given the fact that AMD's product lineup at the low end of the market is more competitive than Intel's, we expect to see market share gains in the first part of next year. |
We believe that Intel had largely completed shipping its quarter prior to Sept. 11. |