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Business Microscope.(Company Business and Marketing)
Infineon Buys Sican ... Europe's largest independent IC design house, Sican GmbH, was taken over by its German semiconductor neighbor Infineon Technologies. Sican grew to 300 persons over the course of 10 years and has amassed an arsenal of IC design technologies and IP.
Infineon has renamed the venture Advanced Semiconductor Development (ASD) and plans to rename it again in several months. Infineon apparently does not like to keep legacy names of companies it acquires. In this particular case, Sican has started to establish a brand image.
While the details of the purchase were not announced, ICV believes that Infineon paid in the $60 to $90 million range for the IC design house and IP enterprise. In our view, this is one-fifth to one-third of the market value of the company in today's hot market for intellectual capital. Typically, IC design houses go for 10 to 15 times sales -- values being driven up by demand for technologies and IC design brain power. PMC-Sierra recently bought RISC IC developer QED for $2.3 billion. That comes to about $23 million per employee. It appears to us from the sidelines that Infineon may have used Sican's difficulties with the European Economic Union (EEU) to its advantage.
Apparently, the EEU received an anonymous complaint in 1996 from a competitor about the use of about $150 million in funds received by Sican from government sources. The funding from 1990 to 1998 came from the German federal government and the state of Lower Saxony. In the summer of 1998, the EEU began an official investigation regarding possible misuse of earmarked funds. The EEU competitive watchdog wanted to ascertain who the exact beneficiaries were, the amounts involved, and whether the subsidies complied with EEU rules governing state aid for R&D activities.
As part of the Infineon takeover of 75% of Sican's shares, the EEU legal action was suddenly dropped.
Sican's founding and subsequent employee growth has invigorated the Hannover area with design house spin-offs and increased the electronics activities in the area. Lately, the German company was also starting to attract international attention and was ranked as a top-10 IP supplier by DataQuest.
Our bottom line: score a major win for Infineon and a classic selling valuation debacle by the shareholders ...
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