Freescale sells out for $17.6 billion, wants more
By Paul Miller 
posted Sep 16th 2006 5:44PM
posted Sep 16th 2006 5:44PM
While cellphone giant Motorola has been busy selling endless iterations of the RAZR and other oddly-named phones, their semiconductor spin-off Freescale has been doing quite well for itself, and is on the verge of being purchased for quite a few billion dollars. Freescale just got a $17.6 billion offer from some private-equity types led by Blackstone, which values Freescale stock at $40 a share -- quite an improvement from the $13 a share Freescale went public with in 2004. Freescale has accepted the offer, on the condition that they can accept a better offer within 50 days, with a break-up fee to be paid to the Blackstone types if they do. We just looked between all the couch cushions, but we're still coming up a few billion short, so if you've got $18 bil or so burning a hole in your pocket, now's your chance to break into the hip and happenin' world of UWB, MRAM and other fancy microchips.[Via El Reg]
Who would have thunk it? After all, they couldn't make chips for Apple for toffee...
David
Apple wasn't a big enough customer to justify adding capacity. The world doesn't revolve around Apple, you know...
@Michael
Are you saying Apple didn't put in enough orders for a company like Freescale? I think Apple ordered a fair amount of processors to make Freescale happy...
Not really. Compare the amount of Apple computers with, say, the amount of Toyotas being produced. The world of microchips doesn't revolve around Apple; but even more so doesn't revolve around just personal computers. The amount of work Freescale does in the automotive industry is huge, especially in microcontrollers and sensor electronics. Plus all the typical industrial embedded systems. I'd wager that the personal computer world has, in fact, not much to do with Freescale/Motorola these days. Although the iPod uses two ARM7 cores, and Freescale does make ARM7-based processors, but those, again, seem to be targetted towards the Automotive industry (MAC7100 series).
-Tommi
FYI, Freescale provide/sells products to 2 different sectors, which is Transportation & Networking...
And the major customer for FSL is Motorola itself...
And no... Apple is not FSL major customer....
Freescale also makes the brains of the Gigabeat-S
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2006/06/toshiba-gigabeat-s30-teardown.php
@ xerxesdaphat
finally someone with a brain.