(Bloomberg) -- Taiwan’s GlobalWafers Co. increased its offer to buy Siltronic AG to 145 euros ($176) a share to value its German rival at 4.4 billion euros.
The offer, which came before a Wednesday deadline for the tender, is “final” and represents a fair value for Siltronic, GlobalWafers said Saturday in a statement. On Friday, the company increased its offer to 140 euros a share, from 125 euros when the deal was announced on Dec. 10. Siltronic shares rose more than 4% on Friday to close at 145.05 euros.
Siltronic’s Executive Board welcomes the higher bid price and “considers the tender offer attractive,” the company said in a statement Saturday.
The combined company would be the world’s largest silicon-wafer maker by revenue, with a market share of 32% to 35%, Richard Hsia, an analyst at Fubon Securities Investment Services Co. said in December.
The proposed deal would be GlobalWafers’ largest and one of the biggest in the chip industry in more than a year as companies look beyond the pandemic to a return to normal business. The raft of semiconductor deals announced in 2020 is set to break the high-water mark for chip acquisitions. That was reached in 2016, when $122 billion in transactions were struck, including SoftBank Group Corp.’s $32 billion purchase of Arm Ltd.
Competition in the industry is heating up as companies that were once customers, such as Apple Inc., design their own chips and established players like Nvidia Corp. branch out into new areas.
Headquartered in Munich, Siltronic is a leading manufacturer of silicon wafers used in products such as smartphones, computers, navigation and digital displays. The firm, which has production sites and offices in Germany, the U.S. and other advanced manufacturing countries, had global revenue of about 1.3 billion euros in 2019.
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