If the Broadcom-Qualcomm buyout story was an episode of Looney Tunes, you'd now be reading "that's all, folks." After yesterday's presidential order blocking the deal, Broadcom has now issued a press release saying that it's "withdrawn and terminated" its offer to acquire Qualcomm.
Along with tabling the buyout offer, Broadcom will also pull back its nominations for Qualcomm's board of directors. The company will, however, proceed with its plan to re-home its heardquarters stateside and hold a shareholders meeting on March 23. Predictably, Broadcom goes on to say that it's "disappointed with this outcome," but that it'll nevertheless comply with the presidential order.
If it had gone forward, the buyout would be the largest deal ever in the tech industry—at around a cool $120 billion—and would send shockwaves rippling through the market. Among other things, Qualcomm makes the SoCs present in the vast majority of Android-powered handsets. The acquisition would have left Broadcom in a rather unique market position. Meanwhile, Qualcomm's probably refocusing on its bid to take over NXP Semiconductors.
Well now we know BC has 120 billion $ spare. That should be enough money to develop a better-than-Snapdragon chip from scratch three times over.
Seems a bit pointless withdrawing the offer after the President already shot them down. “You can’t fire me, I quit!”
They could’ve probably gone to court to fight it. ARM does not have a large share of the military market, so the “national security” rationale for blocking the merger is a little thin IMO.
At the end of the day, Broadcom probably concluded that pissing off the POTUS was likely not a winning strategy, even if they managed to prevail in court.
Well they also could have gone to court and lost. ARM might have limited usage, but Qualcomm could still have other products tied up in government/military contracts. Heck, there could be some specific projects that are ARM-reliant.
IOW, the possibility of losing could also have been enough for Broadcom to drop the offer.
It has nothing to do with the fact that Qualcomm makes some rather generic ARM products.
It has everything to do with what makes Qualcomm actually interesting: Its wireless technology. And there’s plenty of DoD interest there.
#Trumped
#trumpet?
Now Apple will try to buy Qualcomm–and wackiness ensues!
Intel has been talking about it, too.
Screw that!
AMD is gonna buy Apple!
What happened to Neely cam?
I thought Intel was going to?
There was a very unverified rumor floating around that Intel was going to buy Broadcom after Broadcom bought Qualcomm. Which would have been an even bigger cluster than just Broadcom buying Qualcomm.
The variant of the rumor was that Intel wasn’t going to buy Broadcom entirely but would instead buy out Qualcomm’s SoC group after Broadcom bought Qualcomm, which would still be a mess but a smaller mess.
Nah. More likely, we find out (or are reminded) that Apple bought some small Israeli communications chip design firm 10 years ago without any fanfare. We discover that since then, they’ve been building AppleComm in a secret facility in the Nevada desert.
Now the EU needs to veto Qualcomm buying NXP.
So Qualcomm went crying to the government and it worked.
We have the best government money can buy.
Well, remember the definition of an honest politician–one who stays bought.
Well, Qualcomm’s competitors went crying to the EU about the crime of Apple getting a good deal on modems it worked there too.