The consolidation in the semiconductors/chip IP industry, thus far in 2015:<p>1. Intel-Altera: <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/intel-buys-altera-for-16-7-billion-as-chip-deals-accelerate" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/intel-buys...</a><p>2. Avago-Broadcom (and earlier, Avago + LSI):
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-27/avago-said-near-deal-to-buy-wireless-chipmaker-broadcom" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-27/avago-said...</a><p>3. Silicon Imaging-Lattice:
<a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/lattice-to-buy-silicon-image-for-600-million-1422358580" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/lattice-to-buy-silicon-image-for...</a><p>4. NXP-Freescale:
<a href="http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327236" rel="nofollow">http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327236</a><p>5. (2014) Cirrus-Wolfson:
<a href="http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322171" rel="nofollow">http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322171</a><p>6. Avago is further looking at Xilinx, Maxim, and Renesas: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/14/us-chipmakers-m-a-avago-idUSKBN0NZ27520150514" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/14/us-chipmakers-m-a-...</a><p>This is one industry that is in flux ATM.<p>Edit: Further afield, though tightly coupled with this industry, on the manufacturing equipment side, Lam Research announced acquisition of KLA-Tencor today <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/semiconductor-firm-lam-research-to-buy-kla-tencor-1445419669" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/semiconductor-firm-lam-research-...</a>
For those wondering where all the other hard drive companies went: <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg/2000px-Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg.png" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Di...</a>
This sucks for consumers. Prices are already way to high for HDs and don't seem to come down anymore. It is as if there is some sort of price fixing going on.
I always have thought that companies were bought for a price of it's market value (stock price * number of stocks), or if someone did not wanted pay all in cash they would've tried to compensate in other ways until market value is reached.<p>But here WD bought SD for ~85-86$ per share, when it was worth ~75$ per share. It's at least 13% more.<p>Does it simply mean that WD hopes that SD will rise in value rapidly? Or I imagined company buying evaluation wrong?