Texas Instruments (TXN) Hits 52-Week High On Rising Demand

Shares of Texas Instruments, Inc. (NASDAQ:TXN) touched a 52-week high of $100.54, eventually closing a bit lower at $100.25 on Dec 14. The stock has gained 37.4% year to date, substantially outperforming the 19.3% rally of the S&P 500.

The outperformance can be attributed to Texas Instruments’ solid presence in its end markets, stable revenue stream and rising demand for its products. The key catalyst was the company’s steady growth in Industrial and Automotive markets, which is driven by increasing requirement of semiconductor content in these markets.

What’s Driving the Stock?

Texas Instruments has a stable revenue stream owing to its huge customer base and it serves diverse end markets. Also, no customer accounted for more than 10% of sales. All of this makes its revenue stream relatively steady despite the dynamism in each of the markets served.

The company is witnessing strong demand in the fast-growing automotive market, which is expected to witness CAGR of 5.8% between 2016 and 2022, per marketsandmarkets.com. Texas Instruments focuses on infotainment, safety and ADAS, body electronics (including lighting), hybrid electric vehicle and powertrain segments of the automotive market. The company has made significant progress on the ADAS side, shipping millions of chips to this market. Demand for electronic content in cars is expected to grow in the future and this will support the top line of the company.

Texas Instruments is also focused on Internet of Things (IoT). The scope for IoT is tremendous for semiconductor companies, since it connects every conceivable electronic device. Much of the growth in the embedded business comes from microcontrollers, which are the enabling products. Independent research firms, Gartner and IDC project steady growth in IoT-related spending through 2020.

Moreover, TI also launched a partnership program, IoT Cloud ecosystem. As part of it, the company entered into partnerships with companies like 2lemetry, ARM, Arrayent, Exosite, IBM (NYSE:IBM), LogMeIn, Spark, and Thingsquare to provide software, hardware or cloud-based services to support platforms based on TI technology. Such a program is expected to back the top line of the company in the long run.

Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider

Texas Instruments carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) , STMicroelectronics N.V. (NYSE:STM) and NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) are some of the better-ranked stocks in the same industry. All of them sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Long-term earnings growth for Intel, STMicroelectronics and NVIDIA is currently projected to be 8.4%, 5% and 10.3%, respectively.

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