What's Wrong With This Chip Stock Today?

Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN ) is Texas toast in 2012. Shares have fallen 16% in the past year even as the Dow Jones Industrial Average floats around the break-even mark. Last night's second-quarter report didn't change the equation much as TI once again underperformed the market this morning.

The chip-making giant reported $0.38 of GAAP earnings per share. You could adjust that for $0.06 per share in restructuring and acquisition costs, to account for the integration of former rival National Semiconductor. Either way, that's better than the $0.34 per share your average analyst had expected to see. And $3.3 billion in revenue fell right in line with Street targets.

But TI's guidance for the coming quarter fell far short of the Street view, which explains why shares are swooning today.

CEO Rich Templeton blames it all on the shaky global economy, which makes customers and distributors "increasingly cautious in placing new orders." So the third quarter's sales look slower than the typical seasonal pattern.

Orders are particularly slow when it comes to the OMAP line of mobile processors, while chips shipped to mobile infrastructure builders picked up some of the slack. The OMAP features were in some of the last holiday season's hottest smartphones, including Verizon's (NYSE: VZ ) Droid RAZR Maxx, but seems less popular in the current crop of mobile winners. For example, Google went with an NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA ) Tegra 3 chip in its hot-selling Nexus 7 tablet, which in turn is squeezing sales of Amazon.com's (Nasdaq: AMZN ) OMAP-powered Kindle Fire.

The gloomy guidance indicates that this negative OMAP trend isn't changing. NVIDIA and others are stealing market share from the Texas titan. But that's hardly reason to sell your TI shares in a panic. The stock looks affordable at just 17 times trailing earnings or 11 times forward estimates, and TI's juicy 2.5% dividend yield gives you another edge over dividend-free rivals like NVIDIA.

Of course, every component company is dying to find their wares inside of the one company's products that are really moving the needle in both tablets and smartphones, Apple. The company reports earnings today, and in order for investors to understand all of the opportunities and threats facing it, we've prepared this premium research report just for you.

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Fool contributor Anders Bylund owns shares in Google but holds no other position in any of the companies mentioned. Check out Anders' holdings and bio, or follow him on Twitter and Google+. The Motley Fool owns shares of Amazon.com, Apple, and Google. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Apple, NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon.com. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended creating a bull call spread position in Apple. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended writing puts on NVIDIA. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days.

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