Sunday 29th November 2020
Five companies in the world can manufacture 300 millimeter wafers. Now number three wants to buy number four and become number two. The board of directors considers the offer to be appropriate. For the time being, nothing should change for plants and employees in Bavaria and Saxony.
The Munich chip supplier Siltronic is about to be sold to Taiwan. Siltronic announced that it was about to reach an agreement with rival GlobalWafers, who wanted to offer a total of 3.75 billion euros for the MDax company. GlobalWafers is offering 125 euros per share, eleven percent more than the Friday closing price. The Siltronic executive board considers the purchase price to be "attractive and reasonable". The Taiwanese almost certainly have 30.8 percent of Siltronic. Major shareholder Wacker Chemie is about to reach an agreement with GlobalWafers to offer its block of shares at the price offered. The board of directors of the Munich-based family business also consider the offer to be appropriate. Wafers are the basis of most semiconductor elements.
The consolidation on the global wafer market would pick up speed with the takeover. Five companies can produce 300-millimeter wafers – the most modern silicon wafers from which microchips are punched. So far the market leader is the Japanese Shin-Etsu with 30 percent. GlobalWafers is in third place with 17 percent, Siltronic in fourth place with 13 percent. With the takeover, they would at least overtake number two, Sumco.
In 2019, GlobalWafers achieved sales of two billion dollars, Siltronic reached 1.3 billion euros. In the first nine months of 2020, Siltronic's sales fell by 4.5 percent to 923 million euros, while the operating result (Ebitda) fell by 17 percent.
The negotiations had been going on for months, Siltronic said. A binding merger agreement should be signed in the second week of December as soon as the supervisory boards have given their approval. Since the talks began, the Siltronic share price has risen sharply. In November alone it rose by around half, and on Friday the share closed at 113.55 euros.
The corona crisis initially shook the chip industry, but it has now been shown that some companies even benefit from the pandemic, which triggered a surge in digitization. The shareholders of Siltronic are to receive a dividend of two (2019: three) euros per share before the takeover. According to the Munich-based company, the Taiwanese company does not want to change the strategy at Siltronic. The plants in Burghausen in Bavaria and Freiberg in Saxony are secured until the end of 2024. Until then, layoffs for operational reasons are also excluded. The company employs around 3700 people, almost two thirds of them in Germany.
. (tagsToTranslate) Economy (t) Takeovers and Mergers (t) MDax companies