Applied Materials Inc. (NASDAQ: AMAT) is off its highs but still higher on the day after the company raised its dividend and announced a share buyback plan. The company’s board of directors boosted the quarterly dividend from $0.06 to $0.07 and authorized a share buyback plan of up to $2 billion over the next 3-year period. What is more important than just a buyback and dividend raise is what it does for the semiconductor sector. The chip sector is very divided as you have circuits, communications, PCs, and the cap-ex side of the equation. And more.
Today’s news on top of other recent dividend hikes and share buyback hikes is only going to add more pressure for other chip stocks to increase their dividend payments and perhaps to keep buying back stock. Here we are looking at Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), Xilinx Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR), Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE: TXN), QUALCOMM Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM), Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM), Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ: MRVL), Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD), Micron Technology Inc. (NYSE: MU), and KLA-Tencor Corporation (NASDAQ: KLAC). We wanted to compare dividend yields, some brief history, and a potential of whether other dividend hikes will be coming down the road in the various aspects of semiconductors.
RSS Updates
Email Updates
Tonight on CNBC’s MAD MONEY, Jim Cramer continued with his stock picks for 2010 based on investment themes. We have already seen energy shortage picks, counter-terrorism and homeland security picks, and international ADR picks; and tonight Cramer gave his high-hope technology picks in the “tech tsunami” theme for 2010. First, Cramer denies that a war between Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) will only have one winner. Other mobile web build-out and expansion winners as theme stock picks for 2010 are American Tower Corp. (NYSE: AMT), Crown Castle International Corp. (NYSE: CCI), SBA Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: SBAC), Skyworks Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ: SWKS), Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR), Cypress Semiconductor Corporation (NYSE: CY), Xilinx inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX), Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAD: CSCO) that is now deep into wireless and in advanced communications. Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), QUALCOMM Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM), and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC).
Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) issued a mid-quarter update after the close of trading today. What is interesting is that things might not be quite as bad as the company rxoected The news is far away from being good news, but sometimes “less bad is good enough.”
