Intel could be a technology stock worth investing in as it looks to expand its chip business in the second half, an asset portfolio manager told CNBC.
James Gautrey, portfolio manager and global sector specialist at asset management firm Schroders, said that the semiconductor industry made investors “particularly excited,” and that Nvidia was a “poster child for the AI (artificial intelligence) revolution”.
But Gautrey added that, despite new technological developments, there was a “danger” surrounding investment in chipmakers.
Referring to research by Schroders, he said that the cyclical growth rate of an aggregate of semiconductors tended to float around the 3.5 percent mark, showing little deviation over a period of 16 years (from January 2001 to April 2017).
“We’ve seen of course the rise of PCs, the internet, smartphones, the industrial internet, the internet of things – none of them really made a difference,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.
“We don’t know how big this market is going to be in dollar terms, and a lot of these stocks are starting to discount very, very high success rates in future.”
Intel had largely been “written off” by investors, Gautrey said, because it didn’t see successes in fields such as AI, mobile and smart computing – despite being one of the “cheapest, large cap technology stocks”.
“If I was going to pick one that I think in a three/four-year view might be interesting, and I suspect I could be six months early on this one, but I think Intel could be the hidden value here,” he said.
Gautrey added: “They’ve made a lot of acquisitions in the last two years which they’re about to put together, come up with a new chip in the second half. If they get it right, there’s earnings upside, there’s multiple upside in this one, so it could be one to watch.”
On Tuesday, the company quietly revealed a new family of processors called “Ice Lake” on its website. It would mark the chipmaker’s eight generation family of Intel Core processors.
In July, Intel’s second quarter earnings beat estimations, reporting revenue of $14.76 billion vs. the $14.41 billion in revenue expected by analysts for the quarter, according to Thomson Reuters.
Source: Tech CNBC
This chipmaker could be a ‘hidden value’ stock worth watching, according to a portfolio manager