Today: Texas Instruments intends to buy NatSemi for $6.5 billion. Plus: Watch out for email “phishing” schemes. And: Google (GOOG), Pandora, Silicon Valley tech stocks.
$6.5 billion NatSemi deal
Texas Instruments intends to buy Santa Clara chip giant National Semiconductor in a cash deal worth $25 a share, or $6.5 billion, the two companies announced this afternoon.
“TI has much greater scale in the marketplace, with its larger portfolio of products and its large global sales force,” NatSemi CEO Don Macleod said in a statement announcing the deal. “This provides a platform to enhance National’s strong and highly profitable analog capability, power management in particular, leading to meaningful growth.”
As for Texas Instruments, CEO Rich Templeton said, “This acquisition is about strength and growth.”
“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,” Templeton said. “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.”
The companies expect the deal — which is subject to approval by U.S. and international regulators and NatSemi’s shareholders — to close in six to nine months.
Before the deal was announced, NatSemi shares finished regular trading at $14.07, down 16 cents, or 1.1 percent, from last week’s closing price. The stock skyrocketed more than 70 percent to just under $24 in after-hours trading.
Stolen email addresses
Business Break readers, we’re sure you don’t succumb to email “phishing” schemes that appear to be from legitimate businesses, but instead send you to fraudsters’ links designed to trick you into revealing your logins and passwords.
Now, though, you’ll want to be extra-vigilant. According to The Associated Press, several banks, retailers and other businesses are reporting today (or revealed over the weekend) that customers’ names and email addresses have been stolen from Epsilon, a division of Alliance Data Systems that sends billions of emails a year for hundreds of clients.
Among companies reporting stolen email addresses, according to AP: Ameriprise Financial, Barclays Bank, Best Buy, Chase, Citi, Kroger, TiVo, U.S. Bancorp and Walgreen.
Of course, it’s always a good idea to be suspicious about emails that ask for your personal data, but security experts warned that this breach could bring a greater potential for fraud to your inbox.
“You’re not going to see typical phishing where 90 percent of it ends up in spam traps and is easily detected. This is going to be highly targeted,” David Jevans, chairman of the nonprofit Anti-Phishing Working Group and CEO of security company IronKey, told AP.
Google’s $900M patent bid
Today is Larry Page’s first day (in his second tenure, that is) as CEO of Google, and the Mountain View Internet juggernaut is wasting no time making news.
According to an AP report, Google is bidding $900 million for a patent portfolio from Nortel Networks, a once-giant Canadian maker of telecommunications and networking gear that is now selling off assets in bankruptcy court.
Google would be the “stalking horse” bid, but other companies also could make offers for the patents. Google is trying to buy the patents even as it argues for changes to the system, arguing that some software patents are stifling innovation rather than encouraging it.
“If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community — which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome — continue to innovate,” Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president and general counsel, wrote today in a blog post.
More tech headlines
Pandora: According to a Bloomberg News report, the Oakland-based online music service revealed that it has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating how apps for smartphones — including Apple’s iPhone and devices running Google’s Android operating system — gather users’ personal data.
In a securities filing, Pandora said it’s not a specific target of the investigation, according to the Bloomberg report.
Venture capital: Greg Papadopoulos, the former chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems (which, you might recall, was acquired last year by Redwood City tech giant Oracle) is joining New Enterprise Associates as a venture partner, according to a Merc report.
Papadopoulos has been an enterpreneur-in-residence at NEA for the past year. “I kind of fell in love with it,” he told the Merc’s Peter Delevett.
Silicon Valley tech stocks
Up: Oracle (ORCL), Cisco Systems (CSCO), eBay (EBAY), Gilead Sciences (GILD), Yahoo (YHOO).
Down: Apple (AAPL), Google, Intel (INTC), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), VMware.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 0.41 to 2,789.19.
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Up 23.31, or 0.2 percent, to 12,400.08.
And the widely watched Standard & Poor’s 500 index: Up 0.46 to 1,332.87.
Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Frank Russell at 408-920-5876. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercspike.