FBR: Buy Intel...Still

In a report released today, Christopher Rolland from FBR Capital reiterated an Outperform rating on Intel Corporation INTC, with a price target of $40. The company’s shares closed yesterday at $33.41.

Rolland noted, “Last week, we traveled with Intel Corporation’s Gary Willihnganz, director, investor relations. Investor questions were squarely focused around 1) current PC demand and channel inventory levels; 2) expected lift from the Windows 10 release; 3) additional details around the Skylake launch; 4) long-term growth rates for the PC market; 5) components contributing to the expected +15% Data Center Group CAGR until 2018; 6) cloud versus enterprise server growth; 7) new developments for the networking market; 8) changes in mobile strategy and product offerings; 9) expected ramp for SoFIA 3G and 4G later in the year; 10) updates on the Rockchip and Spreadtrum partnerships; 11) growth in the FPGA hardware acceleration market; 12) latest Intel announcement to support eASIC products; and 13) potential Altera mix-up (as expected, the company had no comment)."

"Stepping back, while the lack of growth in PCs during the past few years has been discouraging, we believe that Moore’s law is considerably more durable than any one computing 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.”

Currently, the analyst consensus on Intel Corp. is Moderate Buy and the average price target is $36.74, representing a 10.0 percent upside. In a report issued on May 15, Merrill Lynch also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a $38 price target.

The company has a one year high of $37.36 and a one year low of $25.05. Currently, Intel Corp. has an average volume of 31.04M.

Financial bloggers on sites such as SeekingAlpha, the MotleyFool and others, seem to have Positive view on INTC. When evaluating the opinions of financial bloggers over the last 3 months, 84 percent of bloggers have indicated a Bullish sentiment, while 16 percent have indicated a Bearish sentiment. The average blogger Bullish sentiment in the sector is 67 percent which is less positive than the blogger sentiment of INTC.

Unlike FBR Capital's latest rating, based on the recent corporate insider activity of 126 insiders, corporate insider sentiment is positive on the stock. This means that over the past quarter there has been an increase of insiders buying their shares of INTC in relation to earlier this year. Most recently, in January 2015, Reed Hundt, a Director at INTC sold 15,000 shares for a total of $542,100.