TI buys Nat Semi

Hmmm...  Not sure what this means for analog side...

JR

I've always had a bias toward TI.  Nat. Semi. never quite cut the mustard for reliability,
Sweeping statement, yes, but from personal experience in industrial electronics my comment
is valid. The purchase of Nat. Semi. can only be seen as positive in my eyes.

Frank

I'm really excited about it! (personal opinion!)

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/investor/compinfo/acquire.shtml


Holy sh*t -- we'll have 5x the sales and applications teams that the nearest competition have. holy smokes.

tell them to bring back the 394 at a reasonable price

12volts said:

I've always had a bias toward TI.  Nat. Semi. never quite cut the mustard for reliability,
Sweeping statement, yes, but from personal experience in industrial electronics my comment
is valid. The purchase of Nat. Semi. can only be seen as positive in my eyes.

Frank

Click to expand...

I've seen problems from all vendors. Back in the '70s I used a Sh_ load of TL074s and had several phone discussions with the lads  in TX about what to expect. I used to test the brand new parts 100% before using, or re-selling to my kit customers, and would reject typically less than 1% out of a 1k lot. One of my earlier jobs was working in quality control so I was well aware of statistical sampling and AQL, but my experience and needs compelled me to 100% test. It wasn't until the '80s that I stopped testing that rigorously (note: it wasn't just TI that I screened 100%, everybody was sloppier back in the day, and I needed to be able to tell my kit customers that if a part was broken, they broke it.). Well almost everybody, the few Japanese chips I used were more solid (or better tested than than their US counterparts back then. I had experience using both US and Japanese BBD analog shift registers, and while the US parts were better performance when they worked, the Japanese parts were more robust.  

JR

PS: I'm long some TI stock and it's falling like a rock (down 2%+) in aftermarket trading... This is not uncommon in large buy outs where they expect a hit to profitability of the acquirer, or that they over-paid (wish I was long Nat Semi instead, they are getting a 78% premium), but that's life in the stock market, lets hope TI knows what they're doing. I was betting they did.  

by the way John.

First I heard of it was your post.

That's how hush hush it's been here.

Apparently it's been released or leaked to the financial news services today.

It still stands to be seen how this plays out. I wouldn't hold my breath for the LM394 coming back. More likely more weak sister will fall as the sharp pencil crowd tries to make this profitable.

The future of analog is probably in mixed analog/digital glue circuitry. TI may be better able to capitalize on any jewels in national's portfolio of technology because of their digital chops, but who knows. National had a strong analog bench back in the day, but several already left to form their own companies like Linear Technology, etc. Even RAP is retired, so what have they done lately? 

JR 

This news reminds me of the time when Adobe bought it's competitor Macromedia.... 

If you're in the design field, you know what I mean.

I hope this TI/National deal is not the same case.

JohnRoberts said:

PS: I'm long some TI stock and it's falling like a rock (down 2%+) in aftermarket trading... This is not uncommon in large buy outs where they expect a hit to profitability of the acquirer, or that they over-paid (wish I was long Nat Semi instead, they are getting a 78% premium), but that's life in the stock market, lets hope TI knows what they're doing. I was betting they did.

Click to expand...

The stock prices of most of the major semiconductor companies have recovered from their lows in 2008, but National has languished. So while $25/share is $11 more than the last closing price before the sale was announced, it's still a relative bargain. Of course there's probably a reason why the stock price was languishing ...

I can't think of many of their parts that we use that are not second-sourced. Their Camera Link serializer and deserializers are an exception.

-a

National had some exciting new opamps on their front page: LME49990 and its JFET brother LME49880.

Actually they were released about a year a go but they are news to me. Sampling time!

Andy Peters said:

The stock prices of most of the major semiconductor companies have recovered from their lows in 2008, but National has languished. So while $25/share is $11 more than the last closing price before the sale was announced, it's still a relative bargain. Of course there's probably a reason why the stock price was languishing ...

I can't think of many of their parts that we use that are not second-sourced. Their Camera Link serializer and deserializers are an exception.

-a

Click to expand...

Yup a friend of mine worked at Nat Semi for a while and IIRC when he left he had a bunch of stock options that expired worthless, because of the prolonged soft stock price.

Looks like TI and the entire semiconductor sector is up today (a good thing). Reports are that the purchase will be accretive (break even and contribute to profit) within 12 months. It's a strange market these days (lots of liquidity chasing hard assets and return), and the news about the TI deal seems to have attracted interest in the whole sector, but this is all on low volume so not that meaningful. Of course it's real if we sell today.  ;D  Strangely the market seems to be under reacting to bad news, not a sign of very rational price action. Probably a relative asset class thing. Real estate is still uncertain and bonds are likely to suffer from interest rate increases soon, so what's left,,, stocks?

Interesting times.


JR

edit/ Some of the bounce in semiconductor companies is caused by the rebalance of apple from 20% to 12% (in May) of Nasdaq 100 so other companies in that index will see their share increase. TI is not in that index, so it is up for different reasons. /edit