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Comment by fefe23 | Hacker News Reader

> After two sets of disastrous quarterly earnings the company’s market value has shrivelled to $84bn, less than the value of its plants and equipment, from over $210bn in January.

Holy smokes. I just looked at the INTC 5 year chart and it is, in fact, a bath of blood. I don't think it happens very often that the market cap of a company is less than the worth of its physical assets.

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There was a time when Apple had a market cap approximately equal to its book value, about 4 billion.

This was when basically every article about the company used the word beleaguered, they couldn’t actually ship the computers people wanted to buy, and they were flailing around with their next gen os.

It's hard to value said assets. You'd need a buyer for the fabs to run them as a going concern for them to be worth more than the scrap value and it's not obvious who that buyer might be. Piles of stock noone wants to buy probably aren't assets either, and the expensive office space might not be either.

Being worth less than your assets and liabilities is an extremely dangerous position to be in. The only reason they haven’t been bought and stripped for parts is the fact that the government probably would block it.

INTC is criminally oversold right now. I'm buying as much of it as I can at these prices.

I was contemplating the same thing. I get Intel isn't doing so well but I really can't imagine it just collapsing and dying. That said another possibility is just years of stagnation and low returns on your investment

A definite possibility. Having once worked for them I'm biased and likely too optimistic. They have an army of absolutely stellar engineers.

> They have an army of absolutely stellar engineers.

How many of them are inclined to stay after the value of any stock-based comp was utterly destroyed and layoffs have presumably smashed morale?

They used to have stellar engineers. Are the good ones still there?

A lot of them are still there

I don't invest in stocks so this might be a stupid question: I get that Intel is undervalued now. If things go right it should have a significant premium over its current value. But doesn't that also depend on the rest of the semiconductor sector? Let's say the AI boom bursts. Wouldn't this be a big hit for Intel due to slowdown of semi market, although they are doing good?

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