Broadcom → Qualcomm
The largest technology takeover ever attempted: a hostile bid of up to $121bn including debt by Singapore-based Broadcom for the company behind most of the world's mobile modems, stopped not by shareholders or competition review but by a US presidential order on national-security grounds.
The largest semiconductor deal ever attempted, blocked by US presidential order in March 2018 on CFIUS national security grounds.
- Value
- $117B
- Announced
- November 2017
- Outcome
- Terminated
- Sector
- Technology
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Broadcom (Singapore)
- Target
- Qualcomm (United States)
Why it mattered
Broadcom, run by Hock Tan, had grown by buying chip businesses and cutting whatever did not earn its keep — Avago had taken the Broadcom name after buying it in 2016. Qualcomm licensed the patents underneath 3G and 4G phones, sold the modems that used them, and was in the middle of its own $44bn purchase of NXP Semiconductors. Broadcom offered $70 a share in November 2017, about $103bn including debt; Qualcomm's board refused, and Broadcom went to the shareholders with its own slate of directors. The offer rose to $82 a share, about $121bn, in February 2018 and was cut to $79 — the $117bn recorded here — after Qualcomm raised its price for NXP.
What decided it was the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. It reviewed a hostile bid before any agreement existed, made Qualcomm postpone the shareholder meeting that would have voted on Broadcom's directors, and argued that a Broadcom run for cash would cut Qualcomm's research and cede the setting of 5G standards to Huawei. The order blocking the deal was signed on 12 March 2018, while Broadcom was still moving its legal home from Singapore to the United States, and Broadcom withdrew two days later.
What it left behind
The case showed that in semiconductors the regulator that matters may not be a competition authority at all: national security came to mean technological leadership, not only defence supply, and the same year Congress widened CFIUS's remit with the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act. Qualcomm kept its independence and lost its own deal — the NXP acquisition was abandoned in July 2018 without Chinese approval, amid the US–China trade dispute. Broadcom turned to software instead: CA Technologies for $18.9bn in 2018, Symantec's enterprise business in 2019 and VMware, agreed in 2022. For deal-makers the lesson is that in cross-border technology M&A political risk is a deal-breaker to be priced from the first day, not a timetable delay.