Five big acquisition announcements and more than a dozen smaller deals in 2020 pushed the total value of M&A agreements in the year to an all-time high of $118.0 billion, surpassing the previous record of $107.7 billion reached in 2015
Jan. 13, 2021 8:00 am ET
Mobile-phone chip giant Qualcomm Inc. QCOM 2.09% said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire a chip startup founded by former Apple Inc. engineers, adding to a wave of deals remaking the semiconductor industry.
Qualcomm said it plans to buy Nuvia Inc. and use the two-year-old company’s technology in its flagship smartphones, driver-assistance systems, laptops and networking infrastructure. The proposed all-cash transaction is valued at about $1.4 billion, Qualcomm said, before working capital and other adjustments.
Nuvia’s expertise in designing central processing units, Qualcomm said, would help it boost chip performance and power efficiency characteristics that are vital to success in the hot 5G-networking market that Qualcomm has made a priority.
Qualcomm the world s leading vendor of 5G silicon for devices said it plans to spend a whopping $1.4 billion to buy a two-year-old startup called Nuvia. The acquisition is viewed as an important strategic maneuver by Qualcomm amid growing turmoil in the wider chipset industry.
Nuvia was founded in 2019 by a handful of top chipset executives from Apple and Google. Nuvia Co-Founder Gerard Williams is credited with helping to develop many of Apple s newest central processing units (CPUs), the brains powering some of the iPhone vendor s laptops and smartphones.
As noted by AnandTech, the CPU Nuvia has been building has been touted as able to significantly outperform the competition both in raw performance and power efficiency once it came to market.
A new report from IC Insights shows that 2020 was a record year for M&A among chip companies, with total deals valued at $118bn breaking the previous record set back in 2015 when total deals were valued at $108bn.
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