Alphawave Semi swallowed in Qualcomm's $2.4B connectivity conquest Qualcomm has bid $2.4 billion to buy connectivity specialist Alphawave Semi. If approved it will see yet another London Stock Exchange-listed tech biz put under the control of an overseas owner. Alphawave, whose IP is incorporated into some cutting-edge silicon photonic interconnects, said it has agreed the terms and …
How is this helping the UK to be a player in the international technology market?
It isn't making a difference. Alphawave is only a British company by choosing to list in London as far as I can see there's no UK tech base or material investment. Take a look at their vacancies - mainly Bangalore, followed by Canada, and a spattering of Taiwan, Californian, China, Israel. I didn't find a single UK role in the 108 vacancies the company's website lists.
There is a wider question of how Qualcomm believe the company is worth double what LSE investors think, but that's down to gormless government decisions over two decades that have seen UK pension funds abandon equity markets (followed by insurers). The UK is actually the world's second largest pool of long term capital in the world, but well meant and ill considered government meddling have hammered our equity markets - and that's why British registered companies keep being bought by overseas entities. Government woke up to this fact about three-four years ago, but other than non-binding accords have done little to resolve this. Twenty years ago, pension funds and insurers owned 46% of UK stocks, now that's about 4%. With individual (retail) investors equally detested and discouraged by government it's hardly surprising that UK equities trade at laughable discounts to US companies.
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