Qualcomm reportedly delivers takeover offer to Intel
Is the CPU market about to change forever? Qualcomm appears to be interested in buying Intel
In recent days, Qualcomm has reportedly approached Intel with an acquisition offer, presenting a deal that would forever change the CPU market. This year, Intel’s share value has dropped by over 55%, turning what was once the most valuable company in the world into an underdog.
At its peak, Intel’s market cap was $290 billion. Today, it is worth around $90 billion. Qualcomm, on the other hand, currently has a market cap of $188 billion, making it much more valuable than Intel at the time of writing. According to The Wall Street Journal, Qualcomm intends to take over Intel.
Today, Intel and Qualcomm are competitors within the PC market. That said, Qualcomm’s primary markets are for mobile devices, while Intel caters to higher-power product categories. In recent years, Qualcomm has tried to push its way into the laptop space with new ARM-based CPU designs. However, the company has had little success in gaining market traction. In a sense, both companies don’t truly compete. Even so, any Intel/Qualcomm deal would receive a lot of antitrust scrutiny.
Today’s Intel is a company with a lot of expenditure and lowering profits. Intel has spent years building new fabs and improving its lithography technology. This has been an expensive undertaking but a necessary one given how far their once world-leading fabs have fallen over the past decade. Shareholders see this expenditure as a risk and don’t have faith that Intel’s ambitions will bear fruit. This has resulted in Intel’s massive drop in value, making the company cheap enough for Qualcomm to consider a buyout.
If Qualcomm were to start acquiring Intel, the merger of both companies would likely take years to complete. It would also create an entity with a huge market share within the entire CPU market, spanning from mobile phones to supercomputers. It would also create a situation where a single company develops both top-quality ARM CPUs and top-quality x86 CPUs and would turn Qualcomm into a company with leading-edge silicon fabrication facilities.
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