But it doesn’t signify the end of the M&A frenzy, which has seen something like $150bn change hands since it started early in 2015. Rumours continue to circulate about the fate of a number of companies, including Intersil, which is about to be bought either by Renesas or Maxim Integrated, depending upon which information source you prefer to trust. Xilinx is being touted as a potential acquisition by Qualcomm, speculation continues about ST’s future and you have the feeling that, the way things are moving, there’s every chance a blockbuster deal could appear out of left field.
All of this brings to mind a presentation made some years ago by a representative of a Far East trade association. Included in the back up slides of his presentation was a graph mapping the number of fabs against time. A dotted line extrapolated the trend, with the conclusion being there would, at some time in the future, be a single fab serving the industry.
Electronics companies have tended to follow the opposite trend. While some ‘sand to silicon’ companies remain,the trend has been to move from generalist to more specialist and from ‘fabbed’ to ‘fabless’.
Is this trend reversing? Companies are beginning to broaden themselves again by adding complementary technologies in a move to make themselves more of a ‘one stop shop’. But while we might see more moves to create one stop shops for a particular sector, we won’t see one stop shops for the industry – just as we’ll never see one fab for the world.
