Since March of 2021 the stock has lost almost half of its value, falling from $64 to below $34/share.

EPS $4.66
Dividend $1.46 / 4.3%
Trailing PE ratio 7.24

What's going on with future projections to justify this?

See the CHK thread.

They spent the last decade trying to figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up while the semi market shifted away from PCs dominating.

Semis are hard to own individually as they're always taking each others business. Personally I prefer to own the group and lease the individual names.

They are lost. The world no longer revolves around x86 processors. Their GPU tech is an Nvidia "me-too." They bought Altera how many years ago (I've lost count) and have done literally NOTHING worth mentioning with innovative CPU/FPGA combinations. Their fabs are mostly in China and we all know where that's heading.

Etc.

I stand corrected on that point. Think I was remembering a flurry of news articles recently about their intent to expand in China, but it didn't pan out.

Intel's problem was/is that they tried to design their own chips AND manufacture them. AMD designs chips and outsources manufacturing to fabs like TSMC who are leaders in manufacturing technology. In chips, whoever can manufacture on smaller spatial scales wins... My last intel based product was based on 14 nm chips. The current product I'm working on was delayed by roughly a year because Intel had issues with trying to get 10 nm manufacturing nailed down.

Intel's also facing headwinds against ARM based processors which have typically have better compute performance per watt. ARM processors were originally designed for low power applications, now they're taking market share from Intel in the server market.

Pat Gelsinger's strategy has been to effectively double down on trying manufacture chips. Intel has A LOT of catching up to do.

the only saving grace for Intel is that they are too strategically important to fail given the national security aspect of chip production

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the only saving grace for Intel is that they are too strategically important to fail given the national security aspect of chip production

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Assuming we get more state of the art chip fabs on US soil, I'm not sure Intel is too big to fail. We've still got AMD and ARM (english but allies). I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if an activist came in and carved Intel up.

Another weak point is that the US really doesn't have a lot of onshore printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing. There's some but it's incredibly expensive, a minimum of 2-3x more than what we pay for stuff out of Taiwan or Malaysia. It looks like there are some chinese or taiwanese companies that operate facilities in Mexico but I don't know much about them.

In other news, a chinese company, Biren, just launched their new GPU chipset this week which gives Nvidia's enterprise GPUs a run for their money.

I worked at Intel too many years in the first half of my career.

Honestly it really boils down to leadership and culture. Poor leadership leads to awful decisions. Poor culture takes years to change and they ultimately still have it like a bad infection.

Intel used to make ARM processors - xScale and Otellini jettisoned that group because he didn't see a future in non-x86. He also had no interest in working with Steve Jobs on creating a stealth outfit separate from the rest of the company to attempt to make the first iPhone (this is a true story).

They passed on buying ATI for $5.5B but had no issues plunking down money to continue endless failed attempts to build more powerful GPUs. Plus you have the questionable purchases for McAfee, WindRiver, Altera and dozens of others. Intel purchases take successful business and suck the potential out of them(save Mobile Eye?)

Brian Krzanich was appointed CEO by the board even though he was a baffoon with loose oversight of the Manufacturing details. Bob Swan was a penny counter that couldn't direct the technical vision needed.

Pat is who Intel needed when Otellini when stepped down but the BoD are happy to be incompetent and collect their quarterly fee.

It is too late for Intel now. They left the door open too long and competition across the board is showing how irrelevant their designs+fab are.

Honestly doubling down on growing fab is a bold move and direction. But the path is taking them to huge CapEx and even lower margins than what they had before.

Should have come to y'all earlier

On target. I never worked at intel but poor leadership is prevalent in many industries. Look at what Jeff Immeltt did to GE. He wrecked a huge company and will take a decade to crawl out. Xerox is another example.

Welch started the downfall of GE.