We believe that Intel will be forced to respond competitively to AMD in the coming year, which may put more pressure on Intel's pricing than we had expected. |
We continue to believe Intel will apply competitive pressure to AMD in the desktop and mobile markets in an effort to blunt further shares gains, even if the result is negative for Intel's own profitability in 2006. |
We continue to believe that we are in the second year of a 5- to 7-year investment cycle in Internet infrastructure. |
We suspect that Intel will, at some point, respond with aggressive pricing rather than allow AMD to continue to build market presence. |
We think it's likely that the stock will see a short-term rally on relief that the outlook has not deteriorated further, but the absence of bad news does not constitute an argument in support of the stock...we struggle to understand the upbeat consensus outlook for the fourth quarter. |
We think that the investment community has bought into the idea of a second-half recovery, and that's probably going to happen. |
We think that the most interesting potential for National lies in the wireless market, where the company has the potential to substantially increase its revenue per phone. |
We think that the worst is past in terms of the downturn. |
We wrote last November that Sony's design choices for the PS3 had resulted in an expensive and difficult-to-manufacture product, and we think that we're seeing the consequences of those choices play out now. |
We'd love to tell investors that we anticipated Intel's problems, but we did not. |
We're not raising our estimates for the March quarter, but the strength at Motorola points to the possibility of upside. |
We've seen investment in capacity go up quite a bit and we had a scare this summer with wireless. So you can make a case that the business is in trouble. We try to focus on slightly longer-term fundamentals. The relationship between spending and revenue in this business is still reasonable. Visibility is still good. Pricing is good. Let's not forget, wireless handset demand is growing 50 percent over year-on-year. So with stocks down a bit and the fundamentals still solid, we though it was time to declare the mid-cycle correction over. |
What we can say, however, is that expensively valued stocks are poorly prepared for surprises like the one Intel delivered yesterday. |
What we see happening is a bottoming to the rate of change in the semiconductor business, which has been negative and less capacity being added by the fourth quarter, which is also good. So, although companies themselves are still very conservative we think that the worst is past in terms of the downturn here. |
While many of the stocks in this group are already down by 50 percent over the past several weeks, we believe that inventory concerns, coupled with telecom service provider capital spending concerns, will weigh on the group for the next one to two quarters. |