Texas Instruments (TI) said it plans to acquire National Semiconductor for about $6.5 billion in order to beef up its chip portfolio.
TI’s mobile chips are in products like the Optimus 3D and the National Semiconductor buy will give it access to the company’s 12,000 analog products and customer design tools. Additionally, National Semiconductor has multiple manufacturing plants or fabs, so TI will also be gaining a large footprint for actually getting these products out the door.
“This acquisition is about strength and growth,” said Rich Templeton, TI’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, in a prepared statement. “National has an excellent development team, and its products combined with our own can offer customers an analog portfolio of unmatched depth and breadth. In recent years, National’s management team has done an outstanding job of improving margins and streamlining expenses, which upon close will increase TI’s profitability and earnings per share, excluding transaction costs. Our ability to accelerate National’s growth with our much larger sales force is the foundation of our belief that we can produce strong returns on our investment. The combined sales team will be 10 times larger than National’s is today, and the portfolio will be exposed to more customers in more markets.”
We’re not quite sure how this will impact the mobile space yet but the race for chips is definitely heating up. NVIDIA is pushing hard with its Tegra 2 chipset and it will be facing some stiff competition from the likes of Qualcomm, Intel and others.
[Via Press release]