Intel (INTC): fair value

Fair-value band

The normal range for this name runs from $-5 (cheap) to $11 (expensive); it is now priced at $92.

Is Intel undervalued?

Expensive. Intel trades at $92, 2740% above the fair value this model estimates; the normal range for this name runs from $-5 (cheap) to $11 (expensive).

Diligence checklist

2 pass · 6 fail · 3 no data

• PASSCash actually collected from profit, last 12 months: 930%XBRL · Intel gets $9.30 of real cash for every $1 of reported profit which means profits are real and not just numbers on paper. That's a good sign. 2 of the last 3 years were loss-making and can't be scored on this ratio at all: dividing cash flow by a loss says nothing about earnings quality.
• FAILGap between paper profit and real cash: -13.3%XBRL · Intel collected more cash than it booked as profit, by 13.3% of everything it owns. That is the conservative direction, but it is far enough past my 5% line to flag: a gap this wide usually means something large and non-cash is running through the earnings, and I want to know what it is before I trust the profit figure.
• FAILDebt compared to one year of cash earnings: 13.79xXBRL (dealbreaker) · It would take 13.79 years of earnings to clear what Intel owes, net of the cash it holds. Anything past four years is a dealbreaker for me: at this level a single bad year is a refinancing problem rather than a bad year, and no discount to fair value survives that.
• FAILHow much more it earns on capital than that capital costs: -20.13ppXBRL (dealbreaker) · Intel earns 20.1 points LESS on the capital it employs than that capital costs. Every dollar reinvested here destroys value instead of creating it, which turns growth into a reason to worry rather than a reason to own the business. It has been below its cost of capital for 17 straight quarters, which is 4.2 years. That is capital destruction rather than a cheap stock, and it is where I stop work. The gap is no wider than it was at the start of the window.
• FAILStock sold by executives and directors on the open market, last 6 months: $6.5MEDGAR (dealbreaker) · Miller Boise April sold $4.0M of stock in the last 6 months, outside any pre-planned selling schedule, and $6.5M went out that way in total. My rulebook says more than $5 million of this kind of selling is disqualifying for a "long" position (buying the stock). The full list of open-market sellers: Miller Boise April $4.0M, Chandrasekaran Nagasubramaniyan $2.5M. Options being exercised, and shares held back to cover the tax on them, are not sales and I don't count them either. filing ↗
• FAILHow long the CEO has run this company: 1.6 yearsTEXT · Intel's chief executive took the job on March 18, 2025, 1.6 years ago. I want a full cycle at the company, which I take as 5 years, before a management record tells me anything: a short run has not yet been tested by a bad year. filing ↗
• FAILProfit margin held up during the last sales slump: 36.9% vs 39.2% baseXBRL · The last time Intel's revenue fell, its profit margin per unit sold dropped from about 39.2% to 36.9%, giving up 6% of the margin it went in with. That looks like discounting to hold volume, which is the opposite of pricing power: a business customers won't leave doesn't have to pay them to stay. This is the accounts talking, not the filing: I'm reading the 3 quarters from December 2024 to June 2025, measured against the year going into it, and a shift in what the company sold can imitate pricing power either way.
• N/ANormal profit margin across a full business cycle: n/aXBRL · There is no valuation for Intel, so there is no normal margin to test the current one against.
• N/AHow much of the stock trades on an average day: $12,496MMARKET · Intel trades so much volume that this basically isn't a concern. There's no pass or fail here because the answer depends on how big a position I'd actually want to take.
• N/AShare of revenue from its single biggest customer: not establishedTEXT · I fetched and read Intel's January 23, 2026 10-K but found no sentence about customer concentration. That isn't the same as the filing saying there is none: it may simply be worded in a way my search doesn't catch. Read Item 1 and the concentration-of-risk note yourself before trusting this row. filing ↗
• PASSWhether the company switched auditors in the last 2 years: noneEDGAR · Companies sometimes switch accounting auditors right before something bad is uncovered which can be a warning sign. Intel hasn't changed auditors in the last 2 years, so there's no such red flag here.