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Qualcomm To Buy NXP Semiconductors in $47 Billion Deal (bloomberg.com)
Qualcomm, the largest maker of mobile-phone chips, will acquire NXP Semiconductors NV in a transaction valued at $47 billion, aiming to speed an expansion into new industries and reduce its dependence on the smartphone market. Bloomberg reports: San Diego-based Qualcomm agreed to pay $110 a share in cash for NXP, the biggest supplier of chips used in the automotive industry, or 11 percent more than Wednesday's close, the companies said in a statement Thursday. The deal will be funded with cash on hand as well as new debt. Chief Executive Officer Steve Mollenkopf is betting the deal, the largest in the chip industry's history, will accelerate his company's entry into the burgeoning market for electronics in cars. Eindhoven, Netherlands-based NXP is strong in that sector following its acquisition last year of Freescale Semiconductor Ltd. "It's no secret that we've been looking around," Mollenkopf said in an interview. "If you look at our growth strategy it's to grow into adjacent markets at the time that they are being disrupted by the technology of mobile."
I wonder if this will help them better compete with Nvidia when it comes to making cars smarter. We could certainly use more competition, but I hope Qualcomm can get over their internal staff issues before they get themselves more involved in another industry.
NXP is also synonymous with NFC technology. This is entirely missed in both the summary and TFA it appears.
Am I the only one who can never imagine Qualcomm as anything but the developer of Eudora? It just seems to bizarre to me that this company is now developing computer chips and all this other advanced stuff. Quite a big leap from a proprietary email client. (Yes, I've read about them, and know technically hat their history actually is, but that doesn't change my impression!)
So the number of semiconductor companies continues to shrink. I noticed some time back how Intel's Numonyx has been a part of Micron, AMD's Spansion has been a part of Cypress, and now I read that Freescale had been gobbled by NXP, which now is eaten by Qualcomm.
All these companies might as well formally become design arms of real fabs, like TSMC, GSMC, Samsung, et al
That's derpy as hell, there is no connection at all between the things called "Android" and "Qualcomm."
If you're going to comment on that basis, you'd have to say words establishing a connection first.
The reason this is bad for android is actually that NXP makes a lot of ARM chips that are important to embedded devices, including ones that run... android! That's what makes your comment extra-derpy. Truly a sad day for android, but no, not because there is some "connection" between android and qualcomm but because qualcomm chips are not usable in this revolution of design accessibility.
Sortof, but the Chinese generics are crushing most them in profits. The market forces that are driving the mergers are the same ones that are making things so much better for small and medium sized OEMs. Only the largest OEMs have anything to worry about. You could actually end up with a situation where the largest batch sizes actually more per unit than regular-large quantities! That could happen when there are only a couple mega-suppliers left that can even fill the big orders, but there are a zillion factories offering regular sized batches. You can only get quantity discounts up to the max output of a single supplier; then past that you're paying extra for somebody to scrape together the different batches. And if you need matched parts, then you're paying high prices.
Losing NXP will be a big hit for the small designer, because they sell lots of great chips with quality, easily accessible datasheets. Qualcomm sells expensive chips to exclusive buyers and they protect datasheets as if it is their private laundry. But the overall effects of the mergers might be good for the little guy, mostly because it is a battle that the medium-sized Chinese factories win in the end; and they sell to anybody. And they'll include the datasheet when they have it.
Famous US electronics firm managed straight into the ground by MBA holders with golden parachutes.
Motorola was a great US firm that created the 6800 series 8-bit MCUs that were in TONS of stuff. When the time came to go 16-bit, they leap-frogged and created the fantastic 32-bit 68K series with a wonderful instruction set that treated the entire address space the same and all data registers the same. Intel monkeyed with their 8080 to create the oddball 8086 and 8088 which became the base of the PC and all the freakish instruction set and address mapping garbage we still deal with today. There was a time when the 68K family was in every Mac and in many workstations.
With the rise of the cell phone, management at Motorola got all googly-eyed over profits on the Razor and lost site of the "boring" chip business. They spun-off the microprocessors to a new brand called "Freescale" and the rest to a brand called "On Semiconductor". These geniuses then missed the whole smartphone era and the Motorola brand dissolved. The MBA types undoubtabley parachuted out with bonuses as they always do, leaving the once-proud and mighty Motorola brand as just a small blob of IP and logos being bought and sold by the likes of Google.
While OnSemi appears to be still going, Freescale was recently bought by NXP, which was odd if anything other than market consolidation, since they had a huge overlap in their products. This now appears to have been part of a larger move though if NXP is being sold so soon after buying Freescale. This is reminiscent of Boeing who bought McDonnel-Douglas which had in turn gobbled-up others.
This is a sign of a bad market and/or bad economy. When companies spend their money gobbling each other up in order to tell their share holders that they are experiencing growth, as opposed to investing in new products, services, and markets, it's a sign that they are having trouble in a weak economy. Chains of such mergers are really bad, indicating a more broad economic problem rather than just bad management at one or two firms.
That's derpy as hell, there is no connection at all between the things called "Android" and "Qualcomm."
OK, I'll bite on this. What new Android mobile phones can I buy that don't run on Qualcomm hardware?
Nice one TED, you inserted extra words!
Just take out the extra words, go to newegg or any place that sells android-based devices, and search for "android" instead of "phone" and you'll see that in fact very few android devices have qualcomm anything in them. They do however quite often have CPUs from NXP.
The whole idea of a cell phone chip getting "crushed" in a benchmark is hilarious; newsflash, your cell phone is constrained by other things the IC it uses. As a tablet, lets be honest, qualcomm doesn't stuff doesn't lead the benchmarks, and power trades off for battery life. Qualcomm doesn't have a lock on a smaller IC tech than anybody else, so I know already they don't have better benchmarks even if they made a set of tradeoffs that result in their preferred benchmark results that sync with their marketing.
Nice one TED, you inserted extra words!
Yes, since you clearly were confused as to what I was getting at. Some of us call that a "clarification". I was indeed trying to talk about Android smartphones. You know, the thing I like to buy every 2 years or so when the old one goes obsolete. If those two words weren't enough of a difference, I'm quite capable of producing more.
Just take out the extra words, go to newegg or any place that sells android-based devices, and search for "android" instead of "phone"
Why would I do that, when the only Android devices I'm interested in buying as a consumer are smart phones?
What new Android mobile phones can I buy that don't run on Qualcomm hardware?
Galaxy S7, all non-US versions.
I live in the US, contracted to a US carrier. So for all practical purposes, no I can't buy that.
I don't care what you thought you were "getting at," what I responded to was what you said, because that is what you said.
If what you said didn't mean what you wanted to "get at," maybe try harder?