Intel Corp. Wants to Be a $300 Billion Company

The Oregonian recently got ahold of internal Intel (INTC -0.38%) documents that go over the company's ambition to become a much more valuable company than it currently is.

Per the document, Intel management aims to increase the company's market capitalization to $300 billion, up from approximately $191 billion today. Translating that into a stock price, Intel's gunning for a price of $63 per share (assuming no change in share count between now and then). Let's go over the key financial goals that management laid out in that document.

Image source: Intel.

Earnings per share

Intel apparently aims to grow its earnings per share to $4, up from the $2.12 that it enjoyed in 2016. Although Intel can certainly accelerate its path to $4 per share in earnings through share repurchases -- buying back stock reduces the total number of shares outstanding, which means that earnings per share for a certain level of net income goes up -- Intel will, for the most part, need to grow its revenue and ultimately its net income substantially to reach this goal.

Revenue growth and spending reductions

In the document, Intel apparently shared revenue growth targets for its key business units as well as a target for its operating expenses as a percentage of its revenue. In 2016, the note says, operating expenses made up 35% of the company's revenue; Intel aims to bring that down to 30% by 2021.

While it may seem that some draconian cost cutting would have to take place for Intel to achieve this goal, that's not the right way to think about it. Spending as a percentage of revenue depends on both total spending and revenue. A company can bring that percentage down through cost cutting, revenue growth, or a combination of both. Intel clearly has ambitions to grow its major businesses over time, as management indicated in the documents that The Oregonian obtained.

Intel's targeting annual revenue growth of 10% for its data center business. In its client computing group, which primarily sells personal computer processors and related platform components, the company is planning for a 1% annual decline. Intel's betting on 33% annual growth in its memory business. This part of Intel's business primarily sells NAND flash-based solid-state drives into the data center and recently began selling storage drives based on its 3D XPoint technology, which Intel says offers significant speed and reliability advantages over traditional NAND flash. And, finally, Intel expects 13% annual revenue growth in its blossoming Internet of Things business.

Applying these desired growth rates to Intel's 2016 results in each of these business, we get the following revenue:

Source: Intel earnings report, The Oregonian.

The numbers above exclude Intel's Programmable Solutions Group (formerly known as Altera) as well as the Intel Security Group (which Intel divested) since Intel apparently didn't mention the former in the documents that The Oregonian got ahold of and Intel divested itself of the latter. The point, though, is this: If Intel achieves its revenue growth goals, then that should quite easily bring down Intel's spending as a proportion of its overall revenue.

Foolish takeaway

Intel clearly wants to deliver significant value to its stockholders over the next five years, and it wants a large part of that value creation to come from share price appreciation. With proper execution, Intel can achieve these goals, but it won't be easy, particularly as so much of Intel's plan seems to bet on a breakout in its memory business. Not only does Intel face substantial competition in the memory market, but the market itself is highly volatile and is therefore very hard to predict.

But, if Intel can deliver on this revenue growth, and if it can maintain healthy gross profit margins and maintain some operating expense discipline, then it wouldn't surprise me to see Intel trading somewhere north of $60 per share by the time 2021 closes out.