Qualcomm has quite a good roadmap with Snapdragon 845 and a few successors ligned up for the years to come. A very important 5G NR chip should be ready for 2019. This will, without a doubt, be one of the most important technology transitions at the end of the decade.
Most analysts we talked about this matter including Patrick Moorhead and Anshel Sag of Moor Insights and Strategy, Jim McGregor from Tirias research and Bob O'Donnell from TECHnalysis Research think that Broadcom's acquisition of Qualcomm is a bad idea. Here at Fudzilla we've had a lot of discussion about the acquisition and we cannot see how can this possibly be good for the industry or for Qualcomm.
As we said earlier, Broadcom, a company with a very unsexy roadmap, would benefit a lot. It would be able to show to its investors that it acquired the world leader in 5G, Android SoC, many wireless related technologies, and a great automotive and IoT portfolio. The list goes on.
Fudzilla got quite bullied by Broadcom's PR agency about the last article where our colleagues from the New York Post expected that Broadcom would slash one third of Qualcomm employees.
After many talks with senior stuff at Qualcomm, we haven’t heard a single head talking positive about it. Some of these off the record conversations resulted in comments including : “they (Broadcom) would fire us all." Of course, Us in this semantic would be Qualcomm management.
Hostile takeover will not work
Acquisitions are a long and painful process. One side must always suffer. A few weeks back, we talked about ex ATI employees who were in AMD's graphics division. Despite the fact that AMD acquired ATI technologies in 2006, in some ways graphics people still felt that the acquisition didn’t finalize, 11 years later.
Of course, this sounds crazy but to some extent there is always "us and them" in this equation. As Fudzilla predicted, Broadcom's putative acquisition of Qualcomm would slow down innovation and skew the roadmap with some significant delays.
Qualcomm senior management is very clear, they don’t want the company to be acquired. We doubt that a hostile take over with the help of board members would work out either, this is never a good idea.
Tom Horton, Qualcomm’s Presiding Director also said: “No company in the industry is better positioned than Qualcomm in mobile, IoT, automotive, edge computing and networking and to lead the transition to 5G. Qualcomm stockholders expect a Board that will support this innovation while evaluating objectively the full range of opportunities available to maximize value for all Qualcomm stockholders.”
Fudzilla has implied that the accusation might be to give Broadcom more business and enter into an eternal peace with Apple.