Intel Corp (INTC)

[VeeCee]

Highlighted news about TSM as relates to 3-D transistors.
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Tech Today: AAPL a 12-Month Pick, Amazon’s Cloud, TSM’s Transistors
By Tiernan Ray

Here are some things going on this morning in your world of tech:

PC-related names are reversing some earlier losses and getting a little lift here following yesterday afternoon’s relatively news from Gartner and IDC that Q2 sales were flat to slightly down, year over year, following two years of quarterly drops.

Microsoft (MSFT) stock is up 7 cents at $41.74, Intel (INTC) stock is up 11 cents, or 0.4%, at $31, Hewlett-Packard(HPQ) is down 5 cents at $33.60, Western Digital (WDC) is up $1.06, or 1%, at $95.36, and Seagate Technology (STX) is up 26 cents, or 0.4%, at $58.74.

However, Rob Cihra of Evercore Partners raised his estimates for both Western and Seagate, though he prefers the shares of the former.

Speaking of Microsoft, the Street today is contemplating CEO Satya Nadella‘s long memo to staff laying out thoughts on company direction and philosophy. Citigroup‘s Walter Pritchard wrote in a note that there’s enough in the memo to serve as fodder for both bull and bear, but that we’ll just have to wait to hear more when Nadella takes to the company’s earnings call on July 22nd, after market close.

Apple (AAPL) stock is down 81 cents, or 0.9%, at $94.58, despite being featured this morning in a note from Morgan Stanley trumpeting the stock as one of 15 stocks that should be good picks for the next 12 months.

Speaking of Apple, shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) are up 26 cents, or 1.2%, at $22.68, following a report this morning by The Wall Street Journal‘s Lorraine Luk stating that the company has “begun shipping the computing brains used in smartphones and tablets to Apple,” citing multiple unnamed sources.

TSM had for some time been rumored to be stealing away chip manufacturing business Apple had formerly contracted to Samsung Electronics (005930KS).

Speaking of chips, this is the week for the annual semiconductor equipment gathering in San Francisco, Semicon West. Bernstein Research analysts Mark Li, Stacy Rasgon and team today issued an 18-page note to clients regarding 3-D transistors, saying that the “battle begins” for the so-called “FinFet,” the term that TSM uses for the parts.

The team thinks TSM will “face incrementally greater challenge in this node” than with prior manufacturing milestones.

Shares of Amazon.com (AMZN) are down $1.44, or half a percent, at $328.53, as the company’s “AWS Summit” proceeds in New York, the conference that covers topics for the company’s Amazon Web Services cloud computing. Amazon announced some product updates, including a new offering it calls “Zocalo,” billed as “a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user productivity.” Competition for EMC (EMC) and NetApp (NTAP), perhaps.

In case you missed it, Business Insider‘s Myles Udland has the strange story of CYNK Technology (CYNK), whose shares have soared from 10 cents to almost $15 in two weeks, a greater-than-24,000 % return. “But there is, as you could imagine, a slight problem with CYNK: It’s not clear if there’s any value to it,” writes Udland. CYNK seems to be just a Web site with some vague e-commerce and social network features, he writes.


http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2014/07/10/tech-today-aapl-a-12-month-pick-amazons-cloud-tsm-transistors/