Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Forget about AMD, guys. The real news is this:TSMC revenue guidance down from prior year, Capex going down to 8 billion. Where is fastpathguru when you need him? He was talking big about TSMC outspending Intel in Capex. Now there is only one left really outspending: Samsung. I am really bullish about that company. They have all they need to compete with Intel/Micron for the final pole position in semiconductors. I suspect Intel not to have a lead anymore at 10nm. Intel should hurry to build up the foundry business and squeeze the lights out of TSMC together with Samsung. That would be a nice duopoly in semiconductors: Intel/Micron on one side, Samsung on the other. I guess they wouldn't care to harm each other with low prices, what do you think? There is no way the world would accept only one semiconductor company to deliver all the memory and high end logic chips in this world and Samsung really needs the money since its mobile phone business isn't doing well. Samsung Electronics is still dirt cheap and the balance sheet is very strong, much stronger than Intel's for example. A clear buy in my opinion.

I doubt TSMC will be in time with 10nm, especially after their spending cut. I expect Intel and Samsung to be first. I expect Apple to give all orders to TSMC for their next CPUs to support them, but that will lead to Apple being not the first on a leading edge process. Probably won't harm sales of the iPhone too much, but I predict its sales to come down sharply in the years coming anyway. I don't see many people replacing their iPhone 6 with the 1000$ nuts expensive iPhone 6s.

TSMC and Qualcomm really get squeezed by dismal tablet sales (wasn't that supposed to be the PC?) and by Samsung mainly using its own mobile chips instead of Qualcomm's. In addition, Intel is fighting a price war and enters the low cost market with SOFIA. We'll see how this unfolds, right fastpathguru & wthdk?