Everyone who maintains designs with NXP parts, please take notice: this is a good time to download and keep all the documentation on these components.<p>Qualcomm's track record on releasing and delivering documentation is among the worst in industry. If you are not a big buyer they vetted, they won't even answer your emails or send you the NDA. And after NXP bought Freescale, previously available documents went missing. So, all care must be taken.
When NXP was spun out of Philips in 2006, everybody around the businesses were a tad grumpy about it. Philips got paid a lot for NXP by the private equity folks who took it out, who wrote it down as a loss on NXP's balance sheet.<p>So NXP started its independent life deeply in the red numbers. Doesn't seem nice, does it? People were wondering whether the thing was just gonna be chopped up, sold on, and half the people fired.<p>Instead, however, people had to be much more scrappy than before. The new bosses weren't tech geeks but money sharks. Don't do things that don't have a clear path to profit. Don't waste time. Don't tolerate people wasting their time. Of course, this seems entirely obvious to all of HN, but anyone reading this familiar with Philips culture knows that things aren't always that way. Philips and NXP had (have) plenty of people who were rightfully referred to as furniture. They were there for decades, same desk same chair, and nobody really know what exactly they were doing. Somebody, somewhere, just kept paying the salary.<p>NXP's new need to get back into the black numbers was truly transformative for the company. Sure, it's still a bigcorp with all the quirks you'd expect, but they came a long way.<p>I'd not have predicted a Freescale-level purchase 10 years ago, and I definitely would not have predicted a $38B valuation. That's more than Philips' current market cap ($26B) and NXP was spun out because it was a loss leader that they couldn't turn around.<p>Well done, folks! As a fellow Eindhovener, I can't help but be a bit proud. Too bad you didn't buy Qualcomm instead but you can't have it all I guess!
I'm not so sure this should be allowed. If Qualcomm buys NXP that means they'll own Freescale. That would reduce the number of mobile phone processor manufacturers down to just Qualcomm, ST Micro, Nvidia, Apple, and Samsung. Realistically this means it will be just Qualcomm and Samsung covering almost the entire market of Android devices as the other manufacturer's chips are more niche.<p>I suppose maybe Marvell could catch up and wind up in more phones but they're already the bargain basement chip that winds up in cheap junk tablets. They'd have a long way to go.<p>Intel could also make a sudden change of course and enter the market. Their foray into tablets didn't work out well for them (I own several Intel Android tablets) but at least their performance was on par with the competition at the time.
For those not aware:<p>NXP subsidiary Freescale was originally the semiconductor division of Motorola, which developed the first ever commercial high-power transistor, supplied much of the computing technology to the Apollo program, and developed the MC6800 and MC68000 processors that helped spark the modern computing, gaming and consumer electronics industries.<p>Quite a legacy Qualcomm is aquiring.
<i>Qualcomm intends to fund the transaction with cash on hand and new debt.</i><p>As a layman, I'm surprised a company can simply raise more than a third of their market cap. At this level, isn't debt almost an investment in the company? If revenue falters, how can the lenders make sure they're made whole?
The scale of these acquisitions is really incredible. Qualcomm is acquiring huge company that itself recently acquired its own huge company.<p>How does management successfully integrate these merger of mergers?
There is a sizable NXP facility in the city I live in. I'm really hopeful that this winds up strengthening their business here, rather than resulting in yet another closure.