Yesterday, we revealed that chip stock Intel (INTC) is having a serious problem with landing new customers to keep its fabrication processes going. A new report out gives us a timeline, suggesting that Intel has somewhere around a year and a half to find a big new customer or the entire fabrication concept may be ruined. The news hit shareholders like a bus. Shares dropped almost 2.5% in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
Elevate Your Investing Strategy:
- Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence.
Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon, who has a five-star rating on TipRanks, pronounced sentence on Intel with a grim finality. Basically, between the time involved to get a new process up and running, and Intel’s current state in the market, Intel has about 18 months from right now to either “…land a hero customer on 14A,” or face the closure of its chip foundry.
Rasgon’s projections were supported by Intel’s own recent remarks, where it noted, “If we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading-edge nodes on a go-forward basis. In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects.”
Meanwhile, Somewhere Else
With all the recent firings going on at Intel, as Intel frantically cuts costs and staff, some surprises have started to emerge about what former Intel staff are up to. In fact, one set of Intel veterans recently got together to put together a project for a surveillance tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI). And they raised $40 million to make it happen.
Intel’s former top executive in Israel, Sagi Ben Moshe, is currently in charge of Lumana, a company that is looking to use AI to make video surveillance more powerful. Given that the market for AI video surveillance worldwide is expected to double in the next four years alone, and the AI video analytics market will grow “more than threefold by 2028,” the end result is a market that demands solutions.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on one Buy, 25 Holds and three Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 29.98% loss in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $22.25 per share implies 12.09% upside potential.
