GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓) is close to clearing an important regulatory hurdle in its US$5.3 billion acquisition of German silicon wafer manufacturer Siltronic AG, people familiar with the matter said.
The Chinese State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has said that it is largely comfortable with the antitrust remedies proposed by the companies and could make a formal decision shortly, the people said, asking not to be identified as they were discussing confidential information.
The deal still requires approval from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, and those discussions are ongoing, the people said.
Photo: CNA
GlobalWafers shares were up as much as 7.6 percent in Taipei yesterday, while Siltronic rose 1.1 percent in Frankfurt on Tuesday, giving it a market value of about US$4.7 billion.
“We are still waiting for the final approval in China, but all questions have been answered,” GlobalWafers chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said in an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on Tuesday.
The German government might be concerned that GlobalWafers is headquartered in Taiwan, rather than in Europe, she added.
A representative for Siltronic declined to comment, while a SAMR spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment outside regular business hours.
A representative for the German economy ministry had no immediate comment.
GlobalWafers and Siltronic announced their tie-up in December 2020.
The companies said in October last year that they were in protracted discussions over regulatory clearances in China and Germany.
The takeover would be GlobalWafers’ largest ever and also one of the chip industry’s biggest in the past few years.
Competition in the market for semiconductors is heating up as companies that were once customers such as Apple Inc, are designing their own chips and established players such as Nvidia Corp branch out into new areas.
Headquartered in Munich, Siltronic is a leading maker of silicon wafers used in products such as smartphones, computers, navigation and digital displays.
It has production sites and offices in Germany, the US and other advanced manufacturing countries.
Nomura Holdings Inc advised GlobalWafers on the deal, while Credit Suisse Group AG worked with Siltronic.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS