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Trump Issues Order To Block Broadcom's Takeover of Qualcomm (bloomberg.com) 230

Bloomberg reports that President Donald Trump issued an executive order today blocking Broadcom from acquiring Qualcomm, "scuttling a $117 billion deal that had been subject to U.S. government scrutiny on national security grounds." From the report: The president acted on a recommendation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which reviews acquisitions of American firms by foreign investors. The decision to block the deal was unveiled just hours after Broadcom Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan met with security officials at the Pentagon in a last-ditch effort to salvage the transaction. "There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that Broadcom Ltd." by acquiring Qualcomm "might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States," Trump said in the order released Monday evening in Washington.
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Trump Issues Order To Block Broadcom's Takeover of Qualcomm

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    For some reason.

  • by Flexagon ( 740643 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @06:49PM (#56249769)

    This reminds me of a similar deal that was similarly scuttled: the proposed purchase of Fairchild Semiconductor [nytimes.com] that was then owned by French company Schlumberger, to Fujitsu, a Japanese company. In either case, Fairchild would have been owned by a non-US company from a "friendly" country. National security was the given reason, but Japan's then-growing leadership in semiconductors against US companies was the understory.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @08:19PM (#56250145)

      In this case the understory seems to be America's growing leadership in semiconductors against US companies. The current Broadcom was formed by a merger between Broadcom of California, and Avago, which was formed when two New York based private equity firms bought the semiconductor division of Agilent, which itself was spun out of HP. Being private equity vultures, they moved corporate headquarters to a more tax friendly location, but the operations are still very much based in the US.

      Maybe Obama was somehow involved in setting up the deal, that would explain why Trump has to scuttle it now.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The current Broadcom was formed by a merger between Broadcom of California, and Avago, which was formed when two New York based private equity firms bought the semiconductor division of Agilent, which itself was spun out of HP. Being private equity vultures, they moved corporate headquarters to a more tax friendly location, but the operations are still very much based in the US.

        They are based in Singapore. Also, what you call a merger is what anyone else would call a buyout.

        That Singapore based company now wants to buy out the US based Qualcomm.

  • by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @06:52PM (#56249799)
    I've had enough problems with Broadcom's chips and Broadcom's lack of support for their chips that I think Trump did the right thing here. I tried to bring up a parallel computer on Broadcom's MIPS chip once, eventually decided they were lying about the performance and it couldn't really retire one floating point instruction per cycle. We gave up and switch back to Intel CPUs.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Avago (a Singapore company) purchased that Broadcom and renamed themselves Broadcom.

      Avago itself started as the semiconductor division of HP, but was sold off as part of the HP-Agilent divestment to private equity firms.

      Broadcom itself is an amalgamation of the various companies it purchased over the years. This probably helps to explain why there isn't much coherence to thier documentation or general business strategy.

  • It is hard enough for us to protect our privacy against the likes of Google. Throwing foreign entities into the mix would be suicide.

    • As if self-destruction and suicide was ever much of a deterrent for our federal government.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It is hard enough for us to protect our privacy against the likes of Google. Throwing foreign entities into the mix would be suicide.

      Yeah, that's why we Brazilians were worried last month upon hearing about Boeing's desire to embrace and extinguish our greatest source of industrial pride, EMBRAER.

      Unfortunately our president's spine was more flaccid than Trump's, and now Boeing has a big share of Embraer, to our disgust.

  • by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Monday March 12, 2018 @07:22PM (#56249933) Journal

    .... this is the 2nd time in about as many weeks as I've seen the US president invoke an argument of "national security" on a matter that impacts commercial enterprise, and using that argument as a basis for immediate action that bypassed any of the ordinary measures which might otherwise be required.

    It has become apparent to me that the man uses the expression to mean whatever he thinks it ought to mean, and has no bearing on the actual definition of the term.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12, 2018 @07:48PM (#56250033)

      Obama did the same. So did Bush. And Clinton and the other Bush and so on way back over a century. It's a standard political practice that falls under the umbrella of protecting US interests.

      It seems new only because you have never paid attention before.

      • by mark-t ( 151149 )
        Uhm... On matters of *commercial* enterprise? I can't think of any Obama did, or Bush or Clinton for that matter.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    so basically, lobbyists for Intel were successful to fend of this merger, as it would've definitely sunk the Intel behemoth.

    now they managed to maintain status quo until the next time...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      And the alternative was even more grim. Broadcom has proven itself to be utterly incompetent and unfriendly. It was almost immediately apparent that they just wanted to kill the competition in a anti-competitive manner.

      This was a good decision, even if for the wrong reason. Sometimes, you just have to take what you can get.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday March 12, 2018 @07:30PM (#56249957)
    not Trump. Nobody listens to Trump. This became obvious when the stock market stopped reacting to his tweets. He literally said we should ignore due process and take away people's guns. If Obama had done that gun stocks would have gone nuts. When Trump did it not even a blip.
    • Ya, everyone with two brain cells to rub together as got Trump calibrated. He is a liar. If you don't like what he says, wait a few hours and he will do a complete 180.
  • You could finish the summary right there, and it would be news. President takes advice, rather than just going with the first thing to pop out of his head, or whatever got the biggest cheer at a political rally.

  • ....who threatens national security like no other is Trump himself. He should sign an executive order that prevents Trump from engaging in any political and public activities.

I don't have any use for bodyguards, but I do have a specific use for two highly trained certified public accountants. -- Elvis Presley

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