Mergers and acquisitions in the chip industry are gaining momentum. Although it is a huge amount of money, AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx is still not the largest in the industry.
I stumbled upon an article where comparisons were made: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/10/27/amd-xilinx-acquisition-gallery.html
I found it interesting to recall and think about what happened after these M&A.
Virtually all mergers and acquisitions are huge failures. Intels recent acquisition of Altera is a perfect example. Altera has lost all focus for its core business while multiple groups within Intel are distracted by the allure of adding some programmable logic into their products. In almost all cases this makes no sense but incompetent management allows it to happen.
The only consistently successful company at acquisition is Broadcom (Avago). They are successful because they recognized ~ 30% BS jobs exist in all organizations and they force the acquired company to cut these roles. They also ki-l the stupid project that may be fun for engineers but will never add a dime to the business. They also increase prices because they recognize they have a unique product and charge the customer accordingly.
I suspect the Xilinx acquisition will be similar to the Altera acquisition but acknowledge the AMD management seems a little better than Intel’s