Tag Archives: Broadcom

Broadcom (AVGO) and Qualcomm (QCOM)

November 6, 2017 By in mergers and acquisitions, Technology, Uncategorized, white knight Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

(Note:  the company formerly known as Avago agreed to buy Broadcom for $37 billion in mid-2015.  Avago retained its ticker symbol:  AVGO, but took on the Broadcom name.  Hence, the mismatch between name and ticker.  That deal is on the verge of closing now. Presumably AVGO’s recent decision to move its corporate headquarters from Singapore to the US is a condition for approval by Washington.)

AVGO and QCOM

AVGO is a company that has very successfully grown by acquisition (my family and I have owned shares for some time).  Its specialty, as I see it, is to find firms with excellent technology that are somehow unable to make money from either their intellectual property or their processing knowhow.  AVGO straightens them out.

QCOM, a firm I’ve known since the mid-1990s, seems to fit the bill.  The company makes mobile processors for cellphones.  It also collects license fees for allowing others to use its fundamental and important cellphone intellectual property.  QCOM has been in public disputes over the past couple of years with the Chinese government, which has forced lower royalty payments, and with key customer Apple, which is threatening to design out QCOM chips from its future phones.  As I see it, these disputes are the reason the QCOM stock price has stagnated over the recent past.

the offer

AVGO is offering $70 a share in cash and stock for QCOM, a substantial premium to where QCOM shares were trading before rumors of the offer began to circulate.  The current price for QCOM (I’m writing this at around 10:30) of $63.90 suggests that the market has doubts about the chances for AVGO’s success.

Standard tactics would be for QCOM to seek another buyer, one that would keep current management in place.  Since an overly pugnacious management has arguably been QCOM’s main problem, my guess is that a second bidder is unlikely to emerge.

If I were to try to participate in this contest (I don’t think I will), it would be to buy more AVGO.  I believe AVGO’s assertion that the acquisition would be accretive in year one.  So it’s likely to go up if the bid is successful.  If not, downward pressure from arbitrageurs would abate.  On the other hand, I don’t see 10% upside as enough to take the risk QCOM will find a way to derail the bid.  After all, it has already found a way to anger Beijing and 1 Infinite Loop.

Avago (AVGO) and Broadcom (BRCM) …and Intel/Altera

May 29, 2015 By in activist investing, mergers and acquisitions, semiconductor manufacturing, software, stock market, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Two days ago the rumor hit Wall Street that chipmaker and serial acquirer AVGO had found its newest target, BRCM.  Yesterday the offer was announced:  cash and AVGO stock, in approximately 45/55 proportions, totaling $37 billion.

my thoughts

When customers in a given industry group become bigger and more powerful, the natural response among suppliers is to do the same.  This is part of what is going on here.  More than that, AVGO appears to seek out companies whose technological virtuosity far outstrips their management skills.  So it gains not only the marketing benefit of size but also the rewards of improving the profitability of firms whose main virtue has been their intellectual property.

What’s striking about this deal is that in revenue terms AVGO is more than doubling its size.  Although I have no intention of selling the AVGO shares I own, experience says that acquirers often bite off more than they can chew when they make the jump from small acquisitions to super-size ones like this.

One of AVGO’s rumored other targets had been Xilinx (XLNX), the junior partner with Altera (ALTR) in the field programmable gate array duopoly.  I had thought that ALTR would feel more favorably disposed to overtures being made by Intel (INTC), given the possibility that AVGO would buy XLNX and turn the firm into a much more aggressive competitor.  That threat is now gone.  INTC must now rely on pressure on ALTR management from its major shareholders (shareholders are, after all, legally the owners of ALTR and the employers of management) to return to the negotiating table.

As a practical matter, managements have a lot of autonomy, despite the fact that we the shareholders are, technically speaking, the bosses.  Wall Street seems to believe that ALTR is holding out for a higher price from INTC.  While that may be the rhetoric being used, I think the real issue is more basic.  Who would want to go from being the master of all he surveys as the top dog (and treated as a demigod) at a major publicly traded company to being a near-invisible division head in a conglomerate?