Irvine’s Microsemi Corp., a maker of chips for military, aerospace and industrial uses, said Thursday it settled a federal antitrust lawsuit by selling off some recently acquired assets.
Microsemi said it agreed to sell some assets from its $25 million buy of Costa Mesa’s Semicoa Semiconductors Inc. a year ago to settle a suit brought by the Justice Department.
It didn’t disclose terms of the transaction or who it sold the assets to.
The chipmaker said the deal, which is pending approval, will not have an impact on the company’s financial results.
It’s set to provide more details when it releases results for the current quarter, likely in October.
The settlement removes a bit of an overhang on Microsemi’s shares, but investors seemed to shrug off the news.
Shares were flat in afterhours trading on a recent market value of around $1 billion.
The Justice Department filed the suit in December, claiming that the Semicoa deal creates a monopoly on certain types of chips that amplify electrical signals.
The government argued that having a monopoly on those chips allowed Microsemi to unfairly raise prices on its customers, who couldn’t go buy the chips from other suppliers.
At the time, the government said it was seeking to undo the deal and sell off the assets that Microsemi bought from Semicoa, which included millions of dollars of factory equipment at its 47,000-square-foot Costa Mesa chip plant.
Revenue generated by the Semicoa assets from the sales of the products covered in the complaint totaled about $8 million—a small piece of Microsemi’s roughly $500 million in yearly sales.
Analysts estimated that Microsemi was set to see roughly $12 million in additional yearly revenue from Semicoa’s assets.
The company didn’t say which parts of Semicoa it kept and which it will sell.