Avago Technologies chomps up LSI for BEELLLIONS - in CASH

Christmas has come early for LSI investors. Avago Technologies is buying LSI for $6.6bn – and they're paying cash. Avago; who they? A former HP spin-out, Avago is jointly headquartered in Singapore and San Jose. Avago Technologies was once the semiconductor products part of HP, which was separated out as Agilent Technologies …

[Destroy All Monsters]

Leveraged Buyout Tyme!

As is the custom, done on friday so that one can hit the funhouse early.

[joed]

Exactly the same thing came to my mind. Not even 20% down. Reminds of sub-prime mortgage insanity before the crash (at least they buy real business and not some snapchat).

[John Smith 19]

LSI used to do a good line in SANs.

Not as well known as other players like HP, EMC and Sun (as they were at the time). but fully encrypted and could do on the fly drive re-builds.

Nice kit

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: LSI used to do a good line in SANs.

The LSI SANs, which IBM re-branded as the DS4000 and DS5000 lines and several others re-branded were sold to NetApp a few years ago.

IBM is still selling the re-branded LSI/NetApp arrays, but there is a push towards more internal products, such as V7000 and V3700 etc, which is good for everyone, lower price, higher performance, and easier to support for IBM.

[Montreux]

The funny thing is that LSI got into enterprise storage by accident. I was working for them around the millennium when they bought the company that had an enterprise storage division. They didn't actually want it. At that point LSI was all about making semiconductors in the form of ASICs. They bought them for the SCSI technology and even tried to sell off the storage division but no one was buying. Since then the ASIC business has disappeared and the only part of LSI left is the bit that came from an unwanted part of acquisition.

[JeeBee]

Come and Avago if you think you're hard enough!

[Mage]

Stupidity

This ultimately isn't investment but asset stripping.

Avago and LSI are both now doomed by a millstone of debt. The winners are the the people who got the money.

[regorama]

ASIC

I wonder if this is not the key to this acquisition. Maybe someone in Silver Lake is thinking of building ASICs to satisfy China's Bitcoin mining appetite.