The question is: What is the payoff for Intel from all these acquisitions? I've not see any that clearly were a net profit.
Mobileye: Paid $17B for it.
Altera: Paid $17B for it. At the time, Altera had a net profit of $0.5B. With something like $2B in assets, this will take 30 years to break even. How much growth are they expecting to offset that?
McAfee: Paid $8B for it, sold it for later. I'd love to see if they ever made back the amount they paid for it.
Nervana: They recently announced they're dropping the HW they produced. Time will tell if they can adapt the Nervana SW stack to the other ML company Intel just bought.
Infineon: Would love to see the numbers on whether they made a net profit on it. They may actually have with the sale to Apple.
WindRiver: Same question.
Yes, big companies should do some big bets. But bets are to make a net profit in the long run, with several failures along the way. With the amount Intel Capital has dumped in buying companies, and adding in the costs involved while holding them (employee salaries, capital expenses, etc), has Intel made money or lost money?
Thank You for writing pretty much all I want to write.
>Infineon: Would love to see the numbers on whether they made a net profit on it. They may actually have with the sale to Apple.
Likely not. Intel paid $1.4B for Infineon, invested billions into it every year, could not catch up to Qualcomm. Finally got the Apple contract by reducing price. And when they did it took out many of their 14nm capacity that could have been better used for something else. The $20 per pieces also did not really cover their R&D as stated in the court case against Qualcomm. In the end Apple got most of their R&D for $1B, and had to force to sign a license with Qualcomm or faced with the possibility of Intel shutting down their Modem business and they are left with no modem for iPhone.
It's a bet on every car on the planet having an autonomous ai in some foreseeable future.
Which equals to usually three pieces of redundant silicon with high availability failover, functional safety on each, high computer power needs and hard real time requirements (translating to further companion acceleration silicon).
Intel would love that to be Intel instead of some arm, riscv, Nvidia, whathaveyou...
The global vehicle production is in the order of 100mio vehicles per year, and drive ai is a growth market.
Don't forget Havok (sold to Microsoft, presumably at a loss), Recon (shut down), and Lemoptix and Composyt Light Lab (combined into Vaunt and shut down).
Mobileye: Paid $17B for it.
Altera: Paid $17B for it. At the time, Altera had a net profit of $0.5B. With something like $2B in assets, this will take 30 years to break even. How much growth are they expecting to offset that?
McAfee: Paid $8B for it, sold it for later. I'd love to see if they ever made back the amount they paid for it.
Nervana: They recently announced they're dropping the HW they produced. Time will tell if they can adapt the Nervana SW stack to the other ML company Intel just bought.
Infineon: Would love to see the numbers on whether they made a net profit on it. They may actually have with the sale to Apple.
WindRiver: Same question.
Yes, big companies should do some big bets. But bets are to make a net profit in the long run, with several failures along the way. With the amount Intel Capital has dumped in buying companies, and adding in the costs involved while holding them (employee salaries, capital expenses, etc), has Intel made money or lost money?