Silicon Valley semiconductor company PMC-Sierra woke up this morning with another not one, but two suitors as Southern California s Microsemi put in a $2.2 billion bid for the Sunnyvale firm.
The offer appears to be yet another instance of two companies combining forces to seize opportunities in the growing data center and cloud market place.
PMC-Sierra, which employs about 1,500, already was looking at a $2 billion, $10.50 a share offer from Skyworks Solutions, a Woburn, Mass. chip company.
Microsemi is topping that with an $11.50 a share, with the deal valued at about 50 percent above PMC-Sierra s closing price on Oct. 5, the last trading day before Skyworks made its offer public.
PMC-Sierra s shares jumped more than 13 percent Monday to $11.60, suggesting investors see a bidding war shaping up. Shares were already up 50 percent from the day before Skyworks offer.
In a news release, Microsemi s chairman and CEO James J. Peterson said the two chip companies had been in extensive discussions for the past 18 months. The deal will provide Microsemi with a leading position in high performance and scalable solutions targeted for data center and cloud applications, he claimed.
Photo: chips-semiconductor-wafer (Mercury News Archives)
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