This year’s merger and acquisition announcements are driven by deals in networking and wireless connectivity ICs and by suppliers adding products for automotive systems and other strong-growth end-use markets into the next decade.
After slowing in the past couple years, semiconductor merger and acquisition activity strengthened in the first eight months of 2019 with the combined value of about 20 M&A agreement announcements reaching $28.0 billion for the purchase of chip companies, business units, product lines, intellectual property (IP), and wafer fabs between January and the end of August. An analysis in the September Update to IC Insights’ 2019 McClean Report shows the dollar value of semiconductor acquisition agreement announcements in the first eight months of 2019 surpassed the $25.9 billion total for all of 2018 and was close to topping the value in 2017 (Figure 1).
Figure 1
