Qualcomm’s financial standing seemed to have started going slightly down hill when Samsung opted for their own Exynos chipset over the traditional Snapdragon variant in select markets last year. The company had to revise their sales targets for the entire year because of this and while they did beat analyst expectations in Q3 of 2015, revenues were still down $7.1 billion during the same quarter the year before.
The company saw profits increase during Q1 of this year, but overall revenue was still down 19% YoY due to a fall in shipments. Qualcomm losing some of its modem business to Intel puts pressure on them too. So we can see Qualcomm hasn’t had the best track record lately (more specifically, last year), but a new report suggests they can even this out with a possible acquisition. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Qualcomm is looking to acquire NXP Semiconductor for upwards of $30 billion.
Less than a year ago, NXP had acquired Freescale Semiconductor for a cool $12 billion that made the company the “the world’s top maker of automotive electronics.” See, while NXP does offer some ARM SoCs, they are focused more on the low-power components for integrated devices. The company sells a number of automobile products like temperature sensors and power management controllers.
During the first two quarters of this year, NPX saw over a 50% increase in revenue growth compared to the same quarter a year before. So while we could see some overlap here with NXP’s SoC business, this acquisition could be more about expanding away from smartphones and diving into other markets. This type of diversity would allow Qualcomm to still thrive if they happen to have another slip up like they did with the Snapdragon 810, and at the very least it allows Qualcomm to expand without as much risk by acquiring a repertoire of established designs.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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