Investors have had to deal with some tough times lately, and even the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI 0.40%) hasn't been immune to the forces acting on the stock market. On Wednesday morning, however, the Dow briefly saw a bit of a bounce, opening slightly higher after dealing with steep declines in recent days. Yet even the early gains seemed tenuous.
The 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrials are among the largest in the world, and you can find several tech stocks within the Dow. Two of those stocks made news on Wednesday morning, as Intel (INTC -9.20%) announced a restructuring, while Apple (AAPL -0.35%) got some downbeat comments from stock analysts. Here's what you need to know.
Intel looks to break off a piece of its business
Shares of Intel were up about 1% early Wednesday. The semiconductor pioneer said late Tuesday that it would look to separate one of its business units from the rest of the company, with the intent of eventually creating a new publicly traded stock for those interested in the unit.
Intel said it would separate its programmable solutions group (PSG) into a stand-alone business. In Intel's view, the move will more effectively give PSG the autonomy and flexibility it needs in order to compete among other providers of field programmable gate arrays and other programmable products.
Already, PSG serves customers in the data center, communications, industrial, automotive, and aerospace & defense industries, and programmable solutions are becoming ever more important as technological innovation moves forward.
As part of the move, executive vice president Sandra Rivera will become the CEO of the PSG business. The semiconductor company expects PSG to operate independently as of Jan. 1, although it is likely to take longer for the two businesses to separate themselves fully from each other.
Currently, Intel believes it will do an initial public offering of the PSG business within the next two to three years, but it might also look to bring on institutional investors in the interim to accelerate PSG's growth while it remains as a privately held business.
Intel appears to be focusing heavily on making its existing businesses more appealing to investors. That's laudable, but Intel also needs to make sure it doesn't get left behind as many of its semiconductor rivals home in on huge demand for AI chips in the rush to capitalize on artificial intelligence.
Apple gets a downgrade
Elsewhere, shares of Apple were little changed Wednesday morning. The consumer electronics company has seen its stock fall about 12% since the beginning of August, and members of the Wall Street community appear to be losing confidence in the company's ability to keep growing at the pace they would like to see.
The downgrade came from KeyBanc Capital Markets, which cut its rating on the stock from overweight to sector weight. The primary motivation for the downgrade was rising concern about Apple's ability to keep generating revenue growth.
The launch of the iPhone 15 has faced a few hitches, and macroeconomic pressures in key markets like the U.S. could weigh on consumer demand for high-priced electronics more broadly. KeyBanc is also skeptical that current iPhone users will upgrade to the 15 models.
KeyBanc isn't the only Wall Street analyst company that's nervous about Apple's near-term sales. The combination of questionable demand and some potential issues with production throughput is particularly challenging, and few see the iPhone 15 as incorporating major changes with must-have features.
Apple's longer-term prospects arguably depend more on getting users to adopt its associated services than on its hardware sales. Nevertheless, that's a transition that will take a long time to play out. In the interim, you can expect further share-price volatility as sales figures come out.
