China’s Tsinghua Unigroup Wants to Buy Micron for $23 Billion
Potential acquirer is largest state-owned chip design company.
By Jean Jacques Maleval | July 15, 2015 at 3:07 pmTo read this article from The Wall Street Journal, click on:
State-Owned Chinese Chip Maker Tsinghua Unigroup Makes $23 Billion Bid for Micron
Tsinghua Unigroup, China’s largest state-owned chip design company, offered $21 a share for Micron, a 19.3% premium over its Monday closing price, one of the people said.
Comments
If it happens, this acquisition will be an enormous deal by a company totally unknown in the storage industry and up to now having nothing to do with Micron's products including DRAM, NOR and NAND chips, and SSDs.
Reuters even wrote that the price could be more than$23 billion: $38 billion (!), and assuming that the U.S. government approved the purchase of last U.S. maker of DRAM chips, main competitors being Samsung and SK Hynix in Korea, and Toshiba in Japan.
According to Wikipedia and other sources:
Founded in 1988, Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd. is 51% owned by Tsinghua Holdings Co. and 49% by Beijing Jiankun Investment Group; this latter group is controlled by Zhau Weiguo who is also chairman and CEO of Tsinghua Unigroup.
In late 2013 it made two acquisitions (Spreadtrum and RDA Microelectronics) each of which involved a payment larger than its market cap, suggesting that it is acting on behalf of a fund elsewhere. This is believed to be part of a Chinese-government attempt to consolidate the fabless semiconductor sector.
Tsinghua Unigroup already has several links to major U.S. companies. It acquired a controlling stake in Hewlett-Packard Co. 's China networking equipment unit in May. Intel Corp. bought a 20% stake in Tsinghua Unigroup last year for $1.5 billion.
The Beijing-based company offers diversified services under business lines such as high-technology, bio-technology, science park development, and urban infrastructure construction.
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