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Stocks (from 14) Technologies, which was acquired by the
mighty investment firms of KKR and Silver
the chip supply shortage has been prob- Lake Partners. It was then remade into
lematic for makers of chip-making tools, Avago Technologies, which went public in
too. 2008.
Some followers of Applied are asking why Acquisition time
is the stock of second-place Lam Research Avago then acquired several companies.
($542.39 on February 23) much higher It added the legendary Silicon Valley chip
than Applied’s on the same date ($127.86) maker LSI Technologies in December
4
at the close? Still, the Street mostly likes 2013. By August 2014, it was the largest
AMAT. semiconductor company by revenue.
Broadcom (AVGO)
Next, we’ll look at Broad- In May 2015, Avago began the acquisition
com, another fabless chip of an Irvine, Calif. company Broadcom for
provider,and one of the $37 billion, yielding a market value, ac-
stock market’s highest cording to Wikipedia, of $77 billion, a very
flyers. By dint of its enor- valuable enterprise! Avago was then head-
mous earnings, the com- quartered in Singapore.
pany now stands high in
the top 10 of most ana- In November 2017, Broadcome was try-
lysts’ revenue lists. ing to get approval for the acquisition of
Brocade Communications Systems. This
stirred up concern by the Trump Adminis-
tration.
Headquarters moved to San Jose
To assuage these concerns, CEO Hock Tan
said Broadcom would move to San Jose
— the nominal co-headquarters since its
acquisition by Avago.
Perhaps the most compelling part of the
original Broadcom story is that company’s
Broadcom’s San Jose headquarters co-founding by Dr. Henry Samueli and
You would need an extensive and probably next page
confusing, detailed roadmap to follow the
history of the company that now bears the
Broadcom name.
The beginnings
This company, which boasts one of the
most valuable and highest-flying stock
in the semiconductor business, began in
1961 as the Semiconductor Products Busi-
ness of Hewlett-Packard.
In 1999, it was spunoff from HP as Agilent
Henry Samueli pictured with the IEEE Founders Medal. (UCLA)
