Thursday, August 26, 2010

Intel, Please No More Acquisitions

Intel's stock price hit a new 52 week low today, closing at $18.18. This new low happened less than a week after Intel announced an almost $8B acquisition of security software company McAfee. I was thinking about this today as I was driving down the 101 freeway in Santa Clara and passed by McAfee and Intel's headquarters.








Although McAfee and Intel are only located less than a mile apart, they are worlds apart as companies. Not only is one primarily a software and subscription based services company and the other almost exclusively a hardware company, but the key technologies for each company are different and seemingly mostly unrelated.

I will leave it for a future blog on the history of over $20B of failed acquisitions that Intel has made and later liquidated for cents on the dollar over the last 10 years. Now, there is a new news that Intel is considering acquiring Infinieon's wireless business. Based on the market's reaction to the McAfee announcement and Intel's track record of acquisitions, as an Intel shareholder, I humbly ask Intel, please no more acquisitions.