Trump Issues Order to Block Broadcom’s Takeover of Qualcomm
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1) Its a foreign company takeover. This will not hold as Broadcom is domiciling in the US soon.
2) Broadcom has publicly stated that it intends to do private equity style management. They are going to add $100B in debt - which might make them cut R&D. For its size, Qualcomm spends significantly more on R&D and has been a pioneer of many technologies. CFIUS contends this is a natural security concern. Any reduction in US R&D spend on key technologies like 5G will lead to China filling the void.
Avago was spun out of HP in 1999 (American). They were acquired by KKR and Silver Lake Partners in 2005 (both American). Listed on the NASDAQ in 2009. Bought CyOptics in 2013 (American). Bought LSI in 2013 (American). Bought PLX in 2014 (American). Bought Emulex in 2015 (American). And finally bought Broadcom in 2015, closing in January 2016 (American). Then they renamed themselves Broadcom. They moved their legal address from Singapore to Delaware in 2017. Sure their current CEO (Tan Hock Eng) was born in Malaysia, but he has been an executive at various American companies for decades.
They are American all the way down.
It'd be like if Yahoo and SoftBank controlled the majority of Alibaba presently (SoftBank for its part still has 29%). That still wouldn't give them control of Alibaba due to the broader context of China. The fact of the matter would be, Alibaba would still a Chinese corporation that operates under Chinese law.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-qualcomm-m-a-broadcom/sin...
And will Intel buy any of the companies involved?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-considers-possible-bid-fo...
1) The domicile issue nearly prevented Broadcom from acquiring Brocade previously. They're going to continue to get blocked, as CFIUS gets more aggressive. There's zero benefit to remaining in Singapore for Broadcom. Their corporate income tax rate is barely lower than the US now as well.
2) Broadcom may want to attempt another shot at acquiring Qualcomm later, or perhaps another large US tech trophy. They won't be able to do that from Singapore.
That a boy, Trump.
Manufacturing has already been lost to China, so has solar tech. China also edges US in areas where regulation is hairy, like genetic hybrids, cloning, etc. Henceforth, it's important to guard American leadership in technologies where it leads
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outp...
Until recently, the armed forces weren't able to procure clothing manufactured in the US, per federal law. That's how dire certain domains have gotten
If you make most of the product in China, then bring it to the us to put the final touches on it (https://imgur.com/PuyCZ), the final product counts as "US manufacturing output". Does that mean the US manufacturing sector is as strong as ever?
Oh, the production of electronics is up! You make the IC in Taiwan, the circuit board and the power supply in China, the display in Korea, the case in China again, but you put them all together in an assembly line in the US. And because there's more people and more demand for gizmos, you can say that you make twice as many widgets now! Does that really mean American manufacturing has gotten "stronger"?
https://www.securityfocus.com/news/11382
I wonder how many cases there were like this.
Seems legit.
I know we all love to bash Trump, but he might not be entirely evil. Sometimes he's not treated fairly, that said it's all well deserved that's for sure :)
This type of comment has no purpose except as a cheap shot at a disliked president. It simply lowers the S/N ratio and brings HN closer to reddit.
Also, correct spelling is 'sheer'.
In fact, he described his own thought processes perfectly in the quote: "I don't stand by anything." [1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/05/...
National security here is an excuse to stick it to China.
> The government said it feared Broadcom would cut investment in research and development in order to increase short-term profits. That could allow Chinese companies to become the dominant supplier, the U.S. said.
The definition of "national security" keeps getting looser over the years.
And let's not talk about where the term "Banana Republic" originated.
Moving away from the US - thus it has always been. The good old East India Company springs to mind.
The government does not source critical tech to third-parties with international ties. Our soldiers only carry weapons made by American suppliers. Our police only drive American vehicles. Even government software needs to run on domestically-produced platforms (Xbox, generic PC).
It's not because we live in a Tom Clancy novel; we don't want to put ourselves in a position where services we depend on for safety or national security experience shortage or unavailability because of beefs with our suppliers. And we don't want Huawei or Lenovo backdooring things like routers and laptops that might be used in sensitive deployments.
Broadcom at least pay someone to develop a FOSS driver for the VideoCore IV and V, as found in the rPi.
Everybody uses proprietary firmware for their 802.11ac adapters. Mediatek has gotten some interest because the firmware for some of their 802.11ac chips is fairly minimal and doesn't get in the way of substantially improving the open-source drivers.
Post qualcomm takover, their new chipsets are all heavily locked down, and only functional with a huge closed source driver-esque firmware megablob that is buggy and preforms poorly. You cant even set your mac address anymore.
Tying qualcomm to the atheros reputation for open source friendly chipsets is an insult.
Curiously Qualcomm have been submitting more and more, big, patches for the MSM subsystem, the Linux in-kernel part of the Freedreno graphics driver. I think someone has finally woken up and told management that Linux doesn't take two drivers for the same hardware, and once that reverse-engineered stuff was in the tree, you are royally fucked because you now have to play by the rules of whoever is maintaining it if you want to have any hope of upstreaming your proprietary driver.
This is pretty much the situation for the Vivante polluters. They have been so ridiculously ungrateful for the Linux stuff that makes the chips run for the SoC companies that want to integrate their silicon that by now there is a reverse-engineered driver (Etnaviv) in the tree. They are shut out. And on a longer timescale, the same is coming up for ARM and it's Mali (Lima project).
(I'm wary of redditifying HN but I just had to let this out.)
It was Broadcom CEOs privilege to be a guest in the White House, not the other way round.
There's nothing about market systems that typically prevent stupid decisions. The market system, in theory and often in practice, delivers consequences from stupid decisions (see: IBM's current weakened condition and recent 23 straight quarters of contracting sales, while they blow all their profit on share buybacks and further concede the cloud biz - which they were early on - to AWS/Azure/Google).
There are no systems that do not consist of fallible humans. Whether we're talking traditional Socialism, Communism, Fascism, mixed systems, quasi free market, laissez faire.
Patriot act, et. al.
I strongly recommend sonic.net and unwired ltd if they have coverage where you are (sf, north and east bay, mostly)
I wish municipal broadband was the rule in the US instead of the exception.
It’s much easier to vote your local mayor out than it is to vote the president and majority of congress out, especially over a local government service issue.
Trump's nationalized 5G idea is brilliant in that it consolidates all efforts, but also serves to protect freedom. Under the privatized approach we use now, wireless ISPs spy on us, and sell the data to the government. That's constitutional and legal, because the government didn't do the spying. Under a nationalized plan, it would be unconstitutional for the government to conduct dragnet spying.
Do we drive on corporate owned highways? No, and we have the most extensive highway system in the world. For comparison, look how well privatized rail worked out. You're right. Privatized infrastructure sucks.
A good chunk of the national interstate system consists of toll roads, some of which have been privatized (ex: Indiana Toll Road). And the quality of the interstate highways varies greatly by the state. I wouldn't hold out the US public highway system out as an example of how great public infrastructure is maintained...
Is it 10%? 5?
> Today, the 46,730-mile Interstate System includes approximately 2,900 miles of turnpikes.
If you go from Philadelphia to Chicago, it's a toll-road the entire way (PA turnpike -> Ohio turnpike > Indiana tollroad -> Chicago). That's an outlier route, but toll roads aren't uncommon, especially in certain states.
That extensive highway system has destroyed communities, alienated us from one another. It destroyed passenger rail (air travel took the high-end of the market, to be sure, but what business does the government have in using taxpayer money to destroy an entire industry?)
If you were a person of color in the 1950s, highways likely destroyed the places you lived in. And you couldn't follow the white people to the suburbs. Racist people used zoning laws to prevent you, and where would you get the money to do so anyway? The vast majority of the high-paying professions were not open to you.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/syracus...
You mean the highway system that's been underfunded for the past several years even before you take into account the fact that much of it is in dilapidated condition and needs unbudgeted replacement? In contrast to the freight rail system that Europe wishes it had?
"our freight rail is the envy of the world, carrying over 40% of our intercity cargo. Trains carry much less of Europe’s freight, which is why trucks clog Europe’s highways. And America’s rail-shipping rates are the world’s lowest, reducing the cost of doing business in the U.S.; they’ve fallen 45% in real dollars since the industry was deregulated three decades ago."