A failed $20 billion bid by Broadcom Inc. to buy North Carolina software company SAS Institute Inc. earlier this month marked a rare disappointment of late for Corona del Mar’s Henry Samueli, chairman of the San Jose-based semiconductor giant.
Shares of Broadcom (Nasdaq: AVGO) recently hit an all-time high, and are up nearly threefold since 2016, when the firm formerly known as Avago Technologies Inc. paid $37 billion to buy the Irvine chipmaker founded by Samueli and Henry Nicholas thirty years ago. The San Jose firm kept the Broadcom name post-sale.
The two Henry’s were already billionaires before the Avago deal; they’ve added billions more to their wealth over the past five years, according to Business Journal research. Broadcom shares are up about 50% in the past year alone.
Samueli, whose 2.3% stake in Broadcom makes him the tech giant’s largest individual shareholder, is estimated to be worth about $7 billion, while Nicholas, who is no longer involved in the company but is believed to still count a large stake in the company, is estimated at $5.4 billion.
Anaheim Work
Samueli’s local business dealings go well beyond Broadcom, as he and his family have spent the past several years moving ahead with major philanthropy initiatives in the area, and with real estate expansion in Anaheim.
He and his wife, Susan, own the Anaheim Ducks Hockey Club LLC and the company that runs the Honda Center. They’re developing a major real estate project around the hockey arena in that city.
The Samuelis have spent the last several years snapping up land around the Honda Center that will serve as the development site for the proposed project, OCVibe, branded as ocV!BE.
The $3 billion project will include 2,800 residential units, two hotels, more than 800,000 square feet of office space, a new concert venue, food hall, restaurants, parks and other amenities in the area surrounding the 650,000-square-foot Honda Center, which the Samuelis have managed since 2003.
Work carries on for the development. A new general manager for the mega-project, Kim Bedier, was named last week.
Bedier has been serving as the city of Tacoma’s director of venues and events for the Tacoma Dome and other nearby properties in Washington. She oversaw a $31 million renovation of the Tacoma Dome that was completed in 2018.
The first phase of OCVibe is scheduled to open in 2024. The full project is scheduled for completion in 2028, when the Honda Center will host volleyball at the Summer Olympics.
Education, Health Funding
Education and healthcare remain a key focus of philanthropy for the Samuelis, who are providing major funds for a medical campus expansion at the University of California, Irvine.
UCI’s $1 billion-plus Brilliant Future campaign includes a $200 million gift from the couple to create the first-of-its-kind College of Health Sciences focused on “interdisciplinary integrative health.” When the Samuelis’ gift was announced in 2017, the university said it was the largest gift in its history.
Samueli Foundation also provided $39 million to UCI toward the construction of an interdisciplinary science and engineering building, which opened in February.
“It is important for philanthropists to find a focus for their giving,” Henry Samueli told trade publication IEEE Spectrum earlier this year.
“There are too many great things out there that need support, and too many interesting projects to fund, so you just have to focus and narrow your vision. If you gave a dollar to every person in the world, you would have given away $7 billion and accomplished very little. Or you can focus and give much larger gifts to a few programs that will have a huge impact,” he said.
The IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization for electrical and electronics engineers, chose Samueli as the recipient of the 2021 IEEE Founders Medal.
Known for its advocacy of technology advancement, the IEEE selected Samueli for his “leadership in research, development, and commercialization of broadband communication and networking technology with global impact.”
SAS Reversal
Avago went big with its 2016 buy of Broadcom, and has continued to look big when finding other potential acquisitions.
It’s not always been successful, as seen this month.
Three years ago, an attempted $117 billion planned hostile takeover of chipmaker rival Qualcomm Inc. was thwarted after the government nixed the proposed deal.
Earlier this month, Broadcom reportedly had its sights on North Carolina’s SAS Institute. That potential purchase, said to be in the $15 to $20 billion range, fell apart a little more than a week ago after SAS’s founders changed their minds on the deal, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
The acquisition would have helped Broadcom beef up its enterprise software, the WSJ said, while expanding the business beyond semiconductors.
