Friday, September 20th 2024
Qualcomm Said to Have Approached Intel About Takeover Bid
This is not an April fool, as Qualcomm has apparently approached Intel with a takeover bid, according to the Wall Street Journal. The news follows earlier rumours about Qualcomm having eyed the opportunity to buy parts of Intel's client PC business, especially the parts related to chip design. Now it looks like Qualcomm has decided it might as well give it a go and take over Intel entirely, if the WSJ's sources can be trusted. It's still early days though and no official offers appear to have been proposed by Qualcomm so far and it doesn't appear to be a hostile takeover offer at this point in time. As such, this could turn out to be nothing, or we could see a huge change in the chip market if something comes of it.
It's worth keeping in mind that Intel's share price has dropped by around 57 percent so far this year—not taking into account today's small jump for Intel—and Qualcomm's market cap stands at over twice that of Intel's at 188 vs 93 billion US dollars. Even if Intel was to agree to a takeover offer from Qualcomm, there are several antitrust hurdles in multiple countries to get around for the two giants as well. This is despite the two not being direct competitors, but with Qualcomm recently having entered the Windows laptop market, the two are at least competing for some market share there. It's also unclear what Qualcomm would do with Intel's x86 legacy if it acquired Intel, as Qualcomm might not be interested in keeping it, at least not on the consumer side of its business. Time will tell if this is just some advanced speculation or a serious consideration by Qualcomm.
Sources:
The Wall Street Journal (paywall), Reuters
It's worth keeping in mind that Intel's share price has dropped by around 57 percent so far this year—not taking into account today's small jump for Intel—and Qualcomm's market cap stands at over twice that of Intel's at 188 vs 93 billion US dollars. Even if Intel was to agree to a takeover offer from Qualcomm, there are several antitrust hurdles in multiple countries to get around for the two giants as well. This is despite the two not being direct competitors, but with Qualcomm recently having entered the Windows laptop market, the two are at least competing for some market share there. It's also unclear what Qualcomm would do with Intel's x86 legacy if it acquired Intel, as Qualcomm might not be interested in keeping it, at least not on the consumer side of its business. Time will tell if this is just some advanced speculation or a serious consideration by Qualcomm.
102 Comments on Qualcomm Said to Have Approached Intel About Takeover Bid
In the case of Vanguard, in practice they own nothing, everything is owned by the people who invest in their products (like me buying some of their ETF's)
That's why it never went anywhere, despite x86 OSes being all but dead for some time now. Linux i686 is still around, barely, but both macOS and Windows have already dropped it.
www.marketwatch.com/story/tried-to-buy-the-dip-after-the-berkshire-hathaway-glitch-be-ready-for-some-bad-news-5a1ec69f
On topic, this has pump and dump news play all over it.
Also wonder why Qualcomm would offer the deal, Intel has used their defibrillator many times including the Chip Act oxygen, buying Intel would only severe them no matter how much money Qualcomm has.
If they wanted to get into the Windows market it would be easier to just license, unless they also wanted to control the foundries.
Looking back at American aerospace consolidation, it seems like they would.
I'm sure US gov will never approve such deal for obvious reasons, but it's just absolute LOL moment.
And we know how this will end - Broadcom will takeover - sooner or later - everything what moves on this planet. ;)
The thing is that, a deal like this would never pass, for probably the same reasons ARM and Nvidia never passed and also US and the West in general maintain one important advantage against China. The X86 architecture. Qualcomm buying Intel would be just a poison pill for the X86, with Qualcomm probably killing the architecture in favor of ARM and creating a huge mountain of problems to AMD that has cross licensing with Intel to make AMD's life miserable. But killing X86 would mean a future where China and US are now equal, playing both with ARM and Risc-V and that would never be accepted by US.
Or they might be forced to sell certain divisions or grant x86 licenses to Ngreedia, for example.
But this could happen and it would be a fitting end to such a dirty company.
The problem is, Qualcomm is a lot worse than intel on the “dirty” dept.I’m pretty sure that both intel and amd have agreements signed in case something like this ever happened.
Worst case scenario, if Qualcomm buys Intel as a whole, and shuts down x86 production because they're not interested in that market, then we'll be left with an AMD monopoly. Let's hope that day never comes.