Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) stock is climbing in Thursday’s trading. The semiconductor company’s share price was up 3.1% as of 3:15 p.m. ET. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 index and the Nasdaq Composite index were both down 0.5%.
Intel stock is gaining ground today following a presentation from co-CEOs Michelle Johnston Holthaus and David Zinsner at Barclay’s Global Technology Conference. The executives shared some insight into the direction of the business going forward, and Wall Street seems to have been somewhat comforted by the content of the presentation. Intel stock is down roughly 59% in 2024.
Holthaus and Zinsner stepped in as co-CEOs following the recent departure of former-CEO Pat Gelsinger. The company’s path forward amid underperformance for its chip design and semiconductor fabrication units was already a concern for investors, and Gelsinger’s resignation only added to the uncertainty surrounding the business.
With today’s presentation at the Barclarys conference, Holthaus and Zinsner shared some new insights and commented on Intel’s direction going forward. Most notably, they said that Intel’s foundry business is in the process of being shifted to be a subsidiary.
This means it will operate pretty much entirely separately from the chip-design division. The executives also left the door open for the foundry business to be spun off entirely, but Zinsner said that whether the unit would ever be fully separated was a question for another day.
Intel is going through some dramatic structural changes. In addition to discussing plans for creating more separation for the foundry business, Holthaus and Zinsner indicated that the company was open to selling some of its stake in machine-vision specialist Mobileye. It’s also looking for a partner to help take its Altera unit public again. Intel acquired the programmable chips specialist for $16.7 billion in 2015.
As mentioned in the Barclays presentation, Intel has also been facing significant competitive pressures in the chip design space — and Holthaus highlighted recent wins by Advanced Micro Devices as something the company needs to do a better job of combatting. Along those lines, Intel is aiming to make 2025 a year of stabilization and regaining market share in the data center, and the company acknowledges it has a lot of work to do when it comes to taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) opportunities.
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