» Xilinx PRACTICAL STOCK INVESTING

Market gossip is that ALTR recently refused a friendly offer from INTC at $53 a share.

Speculation resurfaced yesterday with rumors that talks have started up again.

The catalyst seems to be the fact that serial acquirer Avago (AVGO–I own shares) appears to be considering a bid for ALTR’s rival Xilinx (XLNX).

AVGO seems to have a knack for finding firms that have excellent technology but which, for one reason or another, find it difficult to achieve consistent profit growth. AVGo buys them, reorganizes them and puts the profit machine into high gear.

In this case, the sub-industry involved is the sleepy world of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), dominated by the cozy duopoly of ALTR and little brother XLNX. AS the name suggests, FPGAs are chips whose program structure is not hard-wired (those are application-specific integrated circuits–ASICs). So they can be reprogrammed, upgraded, debugged…even after they’ve been put into machines that are now in use. This allows manufacturers to get, say, cutting-edge telecom equipment into customers’ hands very quickly. The drawback is cost.

The AVGO move suggests the FPGA arena is about to become considerably more competitive. AVGO/XLNX would be four times the size of ALTR, implying easier access to capital and the ability to offer a much wider variety of products to customers than ALTR. This suggests ALTR realizes the status won’t be quo for much longer and it needs to be part of a bigger entity in order to compete.

To my mind, the big winner in all this would be INTC.

What can we conclude from INTC’s interest in acquiring ALTR?

–when I became interested in INTC as a stock a couple of years ago, it seemed to me that the firm could be viewed as having two businesses–a high-growth one selling servers and a low-growth, cash cow one selling chips for PCs. At the time, I thought the server business alone more than justified the then stock price, and that the PC business was mainly important for its contribution to overhead and its free cash flow generation. A desire to acquire ALTR seems to confirm that this is also INTC management’s view.

–good companies periodically reinvent themselves. After a period of stagnation, this appears to be what INTC is doing

–the threat of low power servers run by ARM chips is serious

–my guess is that a bid will take the form of all or mostly INTC stock. An all or largely cash offer would imply either that INTC thinks its shares are deeply undervalued, that debt financing is too ridiculously cheap to pass up, or that long-suffering ALTR shareholders want to declare investment victory and move on.

–an INTC-ALTR merger spells trouble for Xilinx (XLNX), the main competitor to ALTR

–the main source of value in ALTR is its software. Assessing that, thorough accumulated R&D spending, is the key.

Numbers tomorrow.

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