---
title: "Qualcomm → NXP Semiconductors"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/qualcomm-buy-nxp-semiconductors-2016"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2016"
---

# Qualcomm → NXP Semiconductors

Qualcomm's cash offer for NXP Semiconductors, worth about $47bn including debt when agreed in October 2016, would have been the largest semiconductor takeover to that date; it cleared every regulator except China's, was caught in the 2018 US–China trade conflict and was abandoned in July 2018 with a $2bn break fee.

Abandoned in July 2018 after China's SAMR failed to clear it, with Qualcomm paying a $2bn break fee.

- **Acquirer:** Qualcomm (United States)
- **Target:** NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands)
- **Value:** $47B
- **Announced:** October 2016
- **Outcome:** Terminated
- **Sector:** Technology
- **Deal type:** acquisition

## Why it mattered

Qualcomm was built on smartphone processors and the essential patents behind mobile standards. NXP, spun out of Philips in 2006 and enlarged by its 2015 merger with Freescale, was a leading supplier of chips for cars, microcontrollers, secure identification and payment cards. On 27 October 2016 Qualcomm agreed to pay $110 a share in cash through a tender offer, financed with offshore cash and new debt, and promised $500m a year of cost savings within two years of closing; it said the combination would enlarge its serviceable market by about 40% to $138bn by 2020.

US antitrust clearance came in April 2017, but China's took longest. Meanwhile Broadcom launched a hostile bid for Qualcomm itself. In February 2018, with one approval left, Qualcomm raised its price to $127.50 a share — about $44bn in cash — and cut the acceptance threshold from 80% to 70%; nine NXP shareholders owning more than 28% of the shares, including funds linked to Elliott, agreed to tender at that price. Qualcomm extended its offer at least 29 times while it waited for China's State Administration for Market Regulation as trade tensions rose — Washington's ban on component sales to ZTE, then new tariffs. With no approval by the deadline, Qualcomm terminated the agreement on 26 July 2018 and paid NXP $2bn.

## What it left behind

Both companies turned to their own shareholders the same day: Qualcomm authorised a $30bn buyback, NXP one of $5bn. NXP stayed independent; its automotive group had brought in $1,008m in the quarter before the deal collapsed. Qualcomm's own automotive revenue reached $3,957m in the year to September 2025, up 36% — close to the annual rate at which NXP's car-chip group had been selling in 2018. The episode showed that for chip deals the timetable of the slowest regulator — and the politics around it — sets the real price of certainty, and that a long-stop date is also the date on which a break fee turns from theoretical into cash.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXP_Semiconductors