As far as I know, this company has ruined every acquisition so far. Symantec is ruined. This would probably the case with VMWare too, so I hope Broadcom doesn't acquire VMWare.
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They will lay off as many people to get to a high employee to profit ratio while raising prices on customers who are too embedded and dependent on their products... just like mainframe. Broadcom does not give a sht about you or your well being and act like they doing you a favor keeping you employed. They only care about squeezing as much profit as possible. When you no longer make money for them you lose your job or get sold to another company. Look at what happened to ESD. After the dust settles and they hire backfills the new people will make out like bandits and old employees get 1% raises.
OP you don't know much. AVGO is a roll up machine and has not had one failure yet. You may not like it for your own reasons but employees and shareholders have made a lot of money with this strategy. 37k employees is a lot of fat to cut out. Lots of people will lose their jobs but they will find another.
Welcome brothers! Having Broadcom acquire you is the best thing to happen to you. As a CA now MSD employee I speak the truth. If you are a good technical engineering person then good things await you..
There's a tremendous amount of fat to cut long before you get to cutting R&D. VMW spent nearly 40% of revenues on sales and marketing last fiscal! That's insane for a mature technology name and quite frankly higher than it was for CA.
I get that growth stage companies will do what it takes to buy market share at the expense of having negative cash flow. It's a play that has worked since the rebound in 2010 as VCs and the public markets have been able to absorb it while the Fed continually expanding their balance sheet (aka printing money). But VMWare is not Snowflake or Internet.com. It is a mature company that is the industry standard for virtualization. As such, it could stand a good spring cleaning.
If you listened to this mornings earnings/deal call, you'd hear:
- Cutting VMWare R&D back to the "core" products
- Using channel partners & GSIs to sell to the 1000+ customers outside the Broadcom core of 500 customers for a total of 1500 target customers
- squeezing 63.5% profit margins out of VMWare products (vs. 58% for current Broadcom Software Group products).
So you are correct that they will ruin any significant growth capability or unique value propositions going forward for the VMWare brand. It will be milked for profit to acquire some other company in a few years.