For the past two years Qualcomm has been trying to buy rival chip maker NXP. Now Qualcomm is giving up.
According to Reuters the deal, which was most recently valued at $44 billion, would have been “the biggest semiconductor takeover globally,” but it failed to gain approval of Chinese regulators.
US-based Qualcomm is already the world’s biggest smartphone chip maker, but NXP is a major player in chips for automotive systems, secure payment solutions, and other embedded applications. The company also acquired Freescale Semiconductor a few years ago, which means that NXP’s chips power Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Sony eReaders… although it’s not like that’s a huge market.
Despite the acquisition falling through, Qualcomm says it still plans to build up its presence in the automotive, internet of things, and networking spaces, as well as continuing to produce chips for smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
Qualcomm will pay a $2 billion termination fee to NXP in order to exit the purchase agreement, and the company’s board plans to spend $30 billion to repurchase Qualcomm stock, which will eat up much of the remaining money the company had set aside to pay for the NXP acquisition.
Maybe Apple will buy NXP and add them to their collection of CPU companies.
interestingly freescale, recently bought by NXP, used to be Motorola semi-conductors who provided Apple with CPUs from the PowerPC 601 to the G4 until they switched to Intel.
This would be a case of going full circle.
This is good news. I was surprised when it passed US regulators. Thank you China.
Sony still makes ereaders?