Tag Archives: Intel

4Q15 for Intel (INTC)

January 19, 2016 By in earnings conference calls, Uncategorized Tags: , , 1 Comment

After the close last Thursday, INTC reported results for 4Q15 and the full year.  For the final three months of last year, INTC posted revenue of $14.9 billion, operating income of $4.3 billion, net of $3.6 billion and eps of $.74–all better than the Wall Street analyst consensus. The company also announced an 8% increase in the dividend, to a yearly total of $1.04.

Nevertheless, in Friday trading the stock was down by 9.1%.

What’s going on?

There are lots of moving parts, but in a nutshell INTC appears to be forecasting another flattish eps year for 2016–vs. market (and my) expectations of a return to earnings growth.

The main reason is softness in demand that INTC is already experiencing in its important Asian markets, particularly in China.  My back of the envelope calculation is that pre-tax income for INTC will still be up by about 15% this year, despite a China slowdown.  But I think the shift of business growth from Asia to the US + the EU is the main reason the company is projecting a rise in its income tax rate from 19.6% in 2015 to around 25% this year.  That’s enough to wipe out virtually all the pre-tax improvement in the business.  So the bottom line remains basically unchanged.

Another worry:  during 4Q15 revenue from INTC’s important server business decelerated from a 10%+ growth rate to just over 5%.   Operating income fell by about 4% yoy, as high margin cloud sales cooled while low margin networking sales boomed.  INTC points out that 4Q14 was a record quarter, so simple yoy comparisons may be misleading.  It also says that the fourth quarter has become important enough for online sales that cloud customers don’t want to fool with their websites by installing new equipment.  So for its most important class of customers, 4Q is no longer the seasonal peak for orders, as it has been in prior years.

Two oddities:

–for reporting to shareholders (financial accounting)  INTC is changing the way it expenses the chip manufacturing equipment it uses.  It previously wrote their cost off in equal installments over four years.  It’s now going to use five.

Nothing changes in the way the business is being run or in the way the equipment is written off for income tax purposes.  But annual depreciation cost on the income statement will be about $1.5 billion less than under the old method.  In broad terms, this is enough to offset the rise in the tax rate for 2016.  It’s also the largest factor involved in my thinking pre-tax income will rise significantly in 2016.

It’s hard to know whether Wall Street will regard this accounting change as a good thing of a sign of weakness.  I presume algorithmic traders won’t care.

–for the past couple of years, INTC has tried to buy its way into the tablet business by essentially paying customers to use its chips (the company calls this support contra revenue).  The company appears to have pared back the subsidies significantly during 4Q15.  Tablet units decreased from 12 million in 4Q14 to 9 million in 4Q15, as a result.  But overall tablet revenues increased.–and operating losses in the segment appear to have shrunk.

My bottom line:

For the moment, I’m content to hold the stock.  There’s enough evidence from other hardware companies to suggest that the Asian slowdown is an industry phenomenon, not an INTC specific one.

We’ll also know in a quarter or so whether the cloud business bounces back or not.  Given the significant shift in retail from bricks and mortar to online this holiday season, I’d expect to see strength in cloud orders during 1Q16.

Finally, I’m a bit troubled about the change in depreciation policy.  The effect is to make earnings look better than they would otherwise be.  Is that the purpose, though?  Was INTC forced to do so by its auditors, or is this simply optics (which would be a very bad thing, in my view)?  I’m not sure.

merger mania in the computer chip business: why?

October 16, 2015 By in Current Market Thoughts, internet, semiconductor manufacturing, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This year has been market by a spate (like that word?) of mergers/acquisitions in the computer chip industry, the latest being the potential combination of stodgy Analog Devices with Maxim Integrated Products.   Why is this happening now?

Three reasons:

–cheap financing, even though not necessary in all cases, is still plentiful.  This may not continue to be the case as interest rates in the US rise

–the cost of creating and fabricating new generations of products is becoming very expensive, to the point that some firms can no longer afford to stay independent and remain in the game

—most important, though, is the emergence of mega-customers like Apple and Samsung, or Acer and maybe even Asus, which has changed the competitive structure of the industry.  The situation now is that these few large buyers of components can play one supplier off against another to get better prices.  The only way suppliers can get any market clout is to combine.

 

One might think that this is evidence of the overall tech industry maturing, meaning that we’re entering a period of slower industry growth.  While that may be true, maturity isn’t the sole, or even the main, reason for consolidation.  When the EU was created, for example, cross-border mergers became feasible for the first time.  Small national supermarket chains combined to become EU-wide powerhouses.  For a while, food suppliers remained as small as before.  But the mammoth size of EU-wide purchase orders from the big supermarket chains became so enticing that food suppliers offered unusually high discounts to get the business.  These firms soon realized that they needed scale, both just to get the big supermarket orders and fulfill them and to streamline operations and lessen profit-destroying discounting.  The large scale of the customers forced the suppliers to scale up as well.

The economics works in the other direction, too.  Large scale on the suppliers’ part forces customers to scale up.

In the case of chip companies, I don’t see an easy way to make money right away from ongoing consolidation.  Many of the actors remain unattractive on a stand-alone basis, in my view.  Also, the general rule is that half of the combinations won’t work out, either because the principals can’t get along post-merger or an acquirer pays too much for a target.  Better to let the dust clear and try to assess the combined firms, say, next Spring.  Having said that, I do own Intel and Avago, two consolidators.

Avago (AVGO) and Broadcom (BRCM) …and Intel/Altera

May 29, 2015 By in activist investing, mergers and acquisitions, semiconductor manufacturing, software, stock market, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two days ago the rumor hit Wall Street that chipmaker and serial acquirer AVGO had found its newest target, BRCM.  Yesterday the offer was announced:  cash and AVGO stock, in approximately 45/55 proportions, totaling $37 billion.

my thoughts

When customers in a given industry group become bigger and more powerful, the natural response among suppliers is to do the same.  This is part of what is going on here.  More than that, AVGO appears to seek out companies whose technological virtuosity far outstrips their management skills.  So it gains not only the marketing benefit of size but also the rewards of improving the profitability of firms whose main virtue has been their intellectual property.

What’s striking about this deal is that in revenue terms AVGO is more than doubling its size.  Although I have no intention of selling the AVGO shares I own, experience says that acquirers often bite off more than they can chew when they make the jump from small acquisitions to super-size ones like this.

One of AVGO’s rumored other targets had been Xilinx (XLNX), the junior partner with Altera (ALTR) in the field programmable gate array duopoly.  I had thought that ALTR would feel more favorably disposed to overtures being made by Intel (INTC), given the possibility that AVGO would buy XLNX and turn the firm into a much more aggressive competitor.  That threat is now gone.  INTC must now rely on pressure on ALTR management from its major shareholders (shareholders are, after all, legally the owners of ALTR and the employers of management) to return to the negotiating table.

As a practical matter, managements have a lot of autonomy, despite the fact that we the shareholders are, technically speaking, the bosses.  Wall Street seems to believe that ALTR is holding out for a higher price from INTC.  While that may be the rhetoric being used, I think the real issue is more basic.  Who would want to go from being the master of all he surveys as the top dog (and treated as a demigod) at a major publicly traded company to being a near-invisible division head in a conglomerate?

1Q15 results for Intel (INTC)

April 16, 2015 By in earnings conference calls, internet, semiconductor manufacturing, Stock ideas, Technology Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

the results

INTC reported 1Q15 earnings after the close on Tuesday.   Results were flattish year-on-year, matching analysts’ forecasts.  This was unsurprising, given  INTC had preannounced 1Q15 was not going as well as expected.  The company thinks some, but not much, relief from the current doldrums will appear in the second half.

The culprit has been the traditional PC business.  Small-and medium-sized firms haven’t been converting their old Windows XP desktops to newer machines.  Maybe they’ve decided to wait for Windows 10, or they don’t want to update their (pirated?) Office programs or they just figure they’ll use XP until something breaks.  Whatever the reason they’re not buying.

This hurts INTC in two related ways:  OEMs don’t have to reorder parts   …and they run down their inventory levels to match weaker demand.  INTC thinks the second process was pretty much over by the end of March.

Notebooks and tablets were up, though, and the server-related businesses are going great guns.

picky stuff

INTC now thinks its full-year tax rate will be 25%, not the 27% previously forecast.  This suggests the current mix of business is more Asia, less US than the company previously thought.

INTC is cutting capital expenditure plans.  Weaker PC demand means less need for older factories, which can be refit for more cutting-edge use.  Hence, less need to build from scratch.

Tablet demand was up 45% yoy in 1Q15.  This is good news and bad.  Good that someone wants the chips, bad in that INTC is essentially paying users to take them.  Nothing new here.  However, INTC had expected to begin to show profits on them by yearend.  That apparently is not going to happen.  INTC was likely planning to get out of the hole both by raising prices and by driving down unit manufacturing costs.  My guess is that the first isn’t happening yet.  (My view is that whatever it takes to get INTC parts into the hands of manufacturers is the correct strategy.  Ideally, the prior CEO would have understood the movement away from big clunky tethered PCs and reacted years ago.  But that’s water under the bridge.)

the big change (in my view)

INTC has changed the way it is presenting results to investors, effective with 1Q15.  It is folding the loss-making Mobile and Communications Group into the former PC Client Group, now dubbed Client Computing Group.

Some of this is just optics–the MCG lost about $1 billion a quarter during 2014, mostly trying to jumpstart the tablet business.  So we won’t see the red ink any more.

At the same time, through the magic of subtracting mobile losses from PC profits, the server business  becomes the largest single earner INTC has.

conclusions

In a sense, INTC is saying it wants to be known as an internet infrastructure company that happens to make PCs, rather than as a PC firm that happens to make servers.

Who wouldn’t!, a cynic might comment.

I think  the move is more than that, however.  It may also signal a change in behavior.  The new line of business table neatly divides the company into a growth segment–servers, embedded internet-of-things chips, 3-D flash…–and a mature cash cow, Client Computing.

If so, the first will be run as a profit center and measured by growth, the second more or less a cost center and measured by contribution margin (the reason I wrote about this topic yesterday).

During the conference call (as usual, I read the Seeking Alpha transcript) INTC said the servers etc. are accounting for 60% of the company’s profits right now.  If we assume that these businesses can continue to grow at 20% annually and that CCG stays flat, then servers etc. would be 75% of INTC’s profits–and expanding in scale–in 2018.

This would presumably result in a higher PE multiple at come point, as well as higher earnings.  The question I’m currently pondering is whether this prospect makes INTC more attractive than a tech-oriented ETF.

 

Intel (INTC) and Altera (ALTR): the numbers

April 2, 2015 By in mergers and acquisitions, semiconductor manufacturing, stock market, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Let’s look at ALTR before word leaked to Wall Street that INTC was considering buying the firm.

the basics

ALTR was trading at about $35 a share, with earnings of, say, $1.75 a share in prospect for 2015   …in other words at about a 20x multiple.  The long-term growth rate of eps is probably in the low teens.   The market cap was $10.5 billion or so.

ALTR is one of two firms that together dominate the highly specialized market for programmable logic devices–a relatively stable, by technology standards at any rate, area.

20x for 10%-12% earnings growth doesn’t sent me running to the computer to place a buy order.

where the value is

small stuff

ALTR had $1.6 billion in net cash on the balance sheet at the end of 2014–that after spending $655 million buying back stock last year.

Yearly SG&A is running at about $300 million.  Let’s say INTC could eliminate half of this by substituting its own corporate infrastructure.  That would be enough to boost eps by 25%, so we’re looking at a 16 multiple on current earnings, which would be more reasonable.

the big attraction–intellectual property

The main source of value for INTC is the company’s accumulated knowledge, experience and computer code for creating and operating PLDs. How do we measure that?

The simplest, and only straightforward, thing to do is to add up R&D expenditures over, say, the past decade and see what that totals.  This will be an understatement, of the value of ALTR’s intellectual property because:

–there will always be some R&D related expenditure elsewhere on the income statement,

–duplicating the firm’s accumulated knowledge means spending in today’s and tomorrow’s dollars–not yesterday’s.  The former is always more expensive, and

–we won’t capture stock based compensation.

measuring

1. For ALTR, the 10-year total R&D  is $3 billion.  Arbitrarily add $500 million for stock based compensation.  Add in the net cash.  We get a total of $5 billion in “asset value.”  That doesn’t stack up well with ALTR’s pre-leak market cap.

2. Another approach.  Current R&D expenditure is running over $400 million a year.  Let’s say it would take ten years of spending at the current rate to duplicate ALTR’s intellectual property.  That gets us to $6 billion in “asset value.”

3. Let’s consider the future earnings stream (this is arguably just dart throwing).  Ignoring SG&A synergies, and with 300 million shares outstanding, $1.75 a share in eps translates into net income of $525 million.  Let’s say earnings in eight years are double that, or $1.05 billion.  If earnings progress in a linear fashion (another incredible simplification–but, hey, this is what securities analysts do), then the total earnings over the next eight years will be just over $6 billion.  (Why eight years?  My experience in analyzing corporate behavior in takeovers is that eight years is the outer limit of future earnings that companies are willing to pay for in an acquisition.)

 

Okay, we’ve got one figure, #1, that’s too low and another, #3, that’s too high- (and a giant leap of faith).  Let’s add them together!

They total $11 billion.

Ta da!

That gets us to around the market cap of ALTR before the leak.  To be clear, I’m not willing to defend to the death anything I’ve written so far.  But Wall Street had to be tacitly thinking something like this for the price of ALTR to be at $35.

the leak   …and a dilemma

Look back at #2 above.  For INTC, the alternative to acquiring ALTR is doing #2.  This would be expensive.  More important, it would be time-consuming–time that INTC probably doesn’t have.  And there’s the risk that its effort wouldn’t be successful.

Therefore, the value of ALTR is higher to INTC than to you or me.  INTC is probably also figuring that it can expand the ALTR business dramatically over the coming years by stuffing every one of its servers full of ALTR chips.  Therefore, $10 billion price leaves room for the acquisition to be accretive to earnings in a few years.  Also, SG&A synergies.

On the other hand, any of us with a loose $10+ billion will probably find a lot of things we’d rather do than plunk it all down to buy ALTR.  For us, $35 a share is a pretty rich price.

this brings us to the leak…

Both sides can make up numbers as well as I can.

Both know there are no other suitors.

Both know that INTC really wants ALTR.

Hence, the leak, which I would bet came from bankers representing ALTR.  The idea is–let the market bid up the price/decide what the price should be.

I’m not sure whether the leak makes the situation better or worse.  My guess is that a deal gets done somewhere between $35 and $40.