UPDATE: FBR Capital Markets Reiterates Outperform Rating, Raises PT on Intel Corporation Following Positive Preannouncement

In a report published Friday, FBR Capital Markets analyst Christopher Rolland reiterated an Outperform rating on

, and raised the price target from $30.00 to $32.00. In the report, FBR Capital Markets noted, “On Thursday, June 12, Intel positively preannounced, raising both revenue and gross margin guidance for 2Q14 and the year. Management now expects ‘some' revenue growth in 2014 as the change in outlook was driven mostly by demand for business PCs. The company also raised its quarterly and annual gross margin guidance, which we believe owes to the higher revenue and better mix of higher-cost enterprise processors. We continue to believe the outperformance in enterprise PC is being driven by the end-of-life XP refresh cycle, even past the April 8 deadline. Additionally, we present evidence to support our view that the XP refresh cycle has legs for some time to come as ~25% of operating systems today still run XP. Indeed, it has been just a year since our INTC upgrade, but we continue to anticipate strong earning drivers for the foreseeable future. Overall, while earlier headwinds in PC have been discouraging, we believe that Moore's law is considerably more durable than any one form factor and presents as good a business plan as any in the technology industry. We are increasingly confident that Intel can opportunistically extract value from the extra transistors afforded to it through the best silicon manufacturing operations in the world. We rate INTC shares Outperform and are raising our price target from $30 to $32, based on a multiple of 14x our 2015 EPS estimate (including stock compensation), an appropriate multiple, in our view, given peer valuations and investor concerns about future growth.” Intel Corporation closed on Thursday at $27.96.