The company colloquially known as "Mr. Chips" is back in favor on Wall Street.
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) saw its shares rip higher on Friday after Morgan Stanley turned bullish on the chipmaker for the first time in seven years, upgrading it to overweight. The firm citing the permanent transition of Robert Swan as CEO, as well as a number of other fundamental developments for its new price target of $64 – which implies more than 24% upside from the stock's current levels.
Piper Jaffray's senior technical research analyst Craig Johnson, who's a fan of the semiconductor space, also believes the stock is heading to new highs. Johnson's charting reveals shares of Intel have maintained its uptrend over the past couple of years and are "setting up to retest the old highs at around $60."
Despite the vote of confidence from Morgan Stanley, Mark Tepper of Strategic Wealth Partners believes Intel looks more like a value trap. Tepper notes that while its data center business is a positive, fiercer competition is a major headwind.
Intel reported 13% revenue growth for fiscal 2018 with 20% growth in its data-centric businesses.
On Monday, before the markets open, Intel announced the Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000, designed for service providers to enable 5G next-generation core and virtualized radio access network solutions.
Intel shares are less than 10% from its 52-week high of $57.60 set in June but were still well off their all-time high of $75.83 hit during the dot-com bubble. They opened Monday up 58 cents, or 1.1%, to $53.08.
