Chip companies see demand for semiconductors fall heading into Q4

Tech reporter Dan Howley checks out how chip stocks fared in the first three quarters of 2022.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Chip stocks have taken a beating this year. Intel down around 47% year to date. AMD and Nvidia both off just over 50%. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley joins us now. Dan, you're the tech expert. Semis actually getting off to a strong start for the month of October and the fourth quarter. We're seeing a rally here across the board today. But what should we expect?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, Seana, I think what we're looking for as far as the coming quarter, obviously, on the consumer side of things, you know, how those kinds of devices will sell into the holiday season, that's pretty much the time when Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, those kind of companies, Micron, they do especially well because of the sales of devices, orders obviously going through and things of that nature.

We've seen these companies, though, battered in the previous quarters because we've seen a slowdown in things like PC sales. And we've heard obviously Apple pulling back on what was reported to be an extension of what they were doing as far as iPhone production. So hitting some chip stocks there as well. As you mentioned, we look at something like an Nvidia down 57% year to date, AMD down 43%, Intel, 47%, Micron, 44%, Qualcomm, 35%. By the way, the S&P is only down 22% year to date.

So, not looking very hot for these types of companies. And part of it has to do with the fact that they had this huge, explosive growth during the pandemic as a result of people buying up different pieces of electronics. Nvidia particularly hurt because they had that kind of hangover from COVID, as well as that cryptocurrency hangover, people buying devices for mining equipment and then no longer doing that. So we've seen them have to revise-- in the prior quarter, revise their projections. And so going forward, this is going to continue to be a problem for chip companies.

SEANA SMITH: All right, so might be a little bit of a while here until we see more of a sustained rally from-- on the heels of what we saw today. All right, Dan Howley, thanks so much.