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Broadcom Explores Buying Qualcomm (bloomberg.com)
phalse phace writes: Bloomberg news is reporting that Broadcom may be planning to make an offer to buy Qualcomm. From the report: "Broadcom Ltd. is considering a bid of more than $100 billion for Qualcomm Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be the biggest-ever takeover of a chipmaker. Broadcom is speaking to advisers about the potential deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified because talks are private. The offer of about $70 a share would include cash and stock and is likely to be made in the coming days, the people said." If the deal goes through, Broadcom would become "the world's third largest chipmaker behind Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. and give it a huge swath of the supply chain of vital phone components such as Wi-Fi and cellular modem chips. The two companies are already among the top ten providers of chips ranked by revenue in an industry that's consolidating rapidly."
Big announcement by their CEO with Trump yesterday.
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Broadcom sucks at releasing firmware and hardware programming specs for their wireless gear.
Broadcom wants to buy Qualcomm
Qualcomm bought Atheros, who was traditionally much much better at releasing firmware and programming specs.
This is going to suck.
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It would make me very happy if the merged company rebranded to become Comcomm.
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When there is only one semiconductor manufacturer left what will it be called?
Why is Snark Required?
Incomprehensible swallowing of giant Qualcomm by Giant Broadcomm which was itself swallowed by giant Avago technologies to form giant Broadcomm Limited which has 13 billion in revenue while Qualcomm has 23 billion in revenue (how is that possible?) which will form new company BROADQUAL which will be investigated by the Department of Justice under the Sherman Anti-Trust act for anti-competitive practices, which Qualcomm is already being investigated for. And I ended the run-on senctence with a preposition. We are running forward into the cattle.
Was a consultant in the 90s (Globalstar), then an employee in the '00s. Left in '08. Best company I ever consulted/worked for, by far. Few years back went sailing with a friend, who's friend's boyfriend left Texas Instruments for Qcom, relocating in the process. He didn't want to talk about his work, but said the move was his worst career move he'd ever made. Few months later, 3 couples on a sailboat. Me, my friend, owner of the sailboat and her BF, the ex-TI guy, and a guy I'd worked with in the 90s and some woman sailboat owner was trying to setup with Qcom 90s guy. Ken was his name.
I started talking to Ken about Qcom, he didn't want to talk about it. He was perfectly willing to talk about Qcom 20 years ago, but not life there now. Keep in mind this guy had been there for some 30 years, he was worth a few million, and was still working. He pretty much said that when Paul took over the culture changed overnight. The annual Christmas party, that used to be several shades past awesome? Cancelled. The summer picnics I took my 1 digit old grandkids to? cancelled. The dinners that came in at 7 PM when you were waiting for a chip to clear customs? Cancelled.
I ended up selling all my stock and cashing in my options around 7-8 years ago cuz I needed the money, but damn, that stock hasn't gone anywhere since then. Think I sold at 50 something, stock is now 62 something.
Sigh.
We have chips, in use, that were of Motorola design when they were in cahoots with IBM and Apple. Then Freescale. Then NXP. Now Qualcomm. They just now updated their default install location from C:\Freescale to C:\NXP.
Maybe moving to Renesas won't be too terrible... then again they were NEC.
Which makes it obvious that moving their mailing address was done just to make it easier for US regulators to approve this acquisition.
And don't forget the pending litigation with Apple. Might play better for them as an "American" company.
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Errm, Qualcomm is double the size of Broadcom (both in terms of revenue and number of employees). How the heck is a $13 billion revenue company (Broadcom) with only $4 billion in cash reserves going to buy a company for $100 billion?
Except it’s Qualcomm that filed suit against not Broadcom.
I worked at both
I've invested in both companies
A confession - I have a builtin bias. I know Hock Tan, Broadcom's boss, for decades (before he went into Broadcom)
Overall impression:
Dishonesty runs in the veins of Qualcomm while paranoia runs in the veins of Broadcom
Except it’s Qualcomm that filed suit against not Broadcom.
You know this story is about Broadcom buying Qualcomm, so they'll be the same company, right?
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