Four major M&A deals, each valued at between $1.9 billion and $9.4 billion, have been announced so far this year, pushing the total for the first half of the year to $20.6 billion, the new third-quarter update reports.

By comparison, in the first half of 2021, the combined value of M&A agreements for semiconductor companies, assets, product lines and related business operations was $18.2 billion, with four mega-mergers priced between $1.4 billion and $7.1 billion. In the final six months of 2021, the total value of new semiconductor M&A deals was $4.4 billion, the lowest value in the second half of the year since the beginning of the last decade, according to the report, which was updated in the third quarter.

In 2022, the total value of semiconductor M&A appears to exceed the $22.7 billion in all of 2021. However, barring more M&A deals in the remainder of 2022, the total value this year could fall short of the recent annual norm of about $29 billion (plus or minus $200 million). Acquisition agreements in 2020 hit an all-time high of $117.9 billion, including AMD's acquisition of Xilinx and Nvidia's acquisition of ARM.

The four largest semiconductor acquisition deals in the first half of the year accounted for essentially all of the $20.6 billion in M&A value in the first half of the year, the agency data shows. Several other smaller semiconductor acquisitions totaled less than $25 million.

Data from the agency shows that the top M&A transactions in the first half of 2022 are related to Tsinghua Unigroup. The second-largest chip acquisition deal was Intel's $5.4 billion acquisition of Israeli pure-play foundry Tower Semiconductor. The cash acquisition, announced in February 2022 and expected to close in early 2023, is part of Intel's foray into the foundry business.

In May 2022, California-based Max Linear announced an agreement to acquire Taiwan-based Silicon Motion for $3.8 billion in cash and stock. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of next year.

AMD announced in April 2022 that it would acquire Milpitas, California-based packet processor and cloud computing software startup Pensando Systems for $1.9 billion to boost its presence in the data center market and strengthen its partnership with Intel. compete. In May 2022, it completed the acquisition of Pensando.

Source: IC Insights