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Foxconn Announces Purchase of Belkin, Wemo, and Linksys (androidpolice.com)
Foxconn, the Taiwan-based company best-known for manufacturing Apple products announced that one of its subsidiaries (Foxconn Interconnect Technology) is purchasing U.S.-based Belkin for $866 million in cash. "Belkin owns a number of major brands, including Linksys and Wemo," notes Android Police. From the report: The buyout would make Foxconn a major player in consumer electronics, instead of just a contract manufacturing company. Belkin primarily sells phone/tablet accessories, but also manufactures networking equipment like routers and Wi-Fi range extenders. The company also sells a range of smart home products under the Wemo brand. According to The Financial Times, the purchase is subject to approval from the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment. In other words, there is a very real chance the acquisition could be blocked. President Trump blocked Broadcom's acquisition of Qualcomm earlier this month, based on advice from the committee.
The Chinese are realising they don't need the Western middleman with the suit and tie, the slick haircut, the cheesy grin, the belly, the chauffeur, the glass of wine, the McMansion with his smooth talk about "going forward", "push the envelope", "move the goalposts" and "quid pro quo basis" in order to sell stuff to people living in the west.
Time was when the said parasitic Western middleman thought he was clever by closing the factory doors back home and moving production to China, but in the long term he was only the architect of his own demise, playing into the hands of the Chinese all along.
Unfortunately such is the scale of the problem of all these like-minded smooth-talking Western businessmen who have done absolutely f*ck all but attend meetings for since the late 1970s that the populations of the US of A, Ireland, UK and pretty much the rest of Europe and North America as well have become utterly inept at making basic provisions for everyday life and are completely dependent on the Chinese for simple things like 10k through-hole resistors, matches, cotton wool buds and have therefore set the stage to allow the Chinese to come into all these countries to buy their remaining successful businesses, natural resources and real estate just so the white middle-aged smooth talking businessmen with their talk about key performance indicators can sit and their arse and do nothing for another decade or so.