Wall Street bought Irvine-based Microsemi Corp.’s story on its latest acquisition.
Microsemi’s recent deal for Sunnyvale-based “fabless” chipmaker ASIC Advantage Inc. strengthens its position in the profitable aerospace and satellite industries, according to company officials.
ASIC will “help our customers deliver products to their customer better, faster and cheaper,” said Rob Adams, vice president of corporate development.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The stock market agreed in any case, sending Microsemi shares up immediately on news of the deal.
The confidence continued into last week, when its shares continued to climb right off the bat, reaching a market value of about $1.74 billion by midweek.
Microsemi’s chips serve a variety of military, aerospace, consumer and industrial uses. Its products are built into satellites, digital televisions, X-ray body scanners and other devices. Customers include Cisco Systems Inc., Boeing Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
ASIC designs and makes integrated circuits for the aerospace, automotive, communications, industrial and medical markets. Products include controllers, sensors, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and radiation-tested devices.
Microsemi did not provide any guidance on management changes or employment that might stem from the ASIC acquisition. Executives plan to discuss the deal in more detail later this month during the company’s third-quarter conference call.
Fabless chipmakers design chips but don’t operate factories, known in the industry as wafer fabrication plants. They typically hire contract manufacturers in Asia to produce their chips.
Microsemi is Orange County’s third-biggest chipmaker by sales and reported about $520 million in revenue for the 12 months through October. It’s aiming to grow to $1 billion in annual sales, according to analysts, with acquisitions helping boost revenue.
Irvine-based Broadcom Corp. is the biggest local chipmaker, followed by New-port Beach-based Jazz Semiconductor Inc., part of Israel’s Tower Semiconductor Ltd.
YouMail Milestones
Irvine-based YouMail Inc., which makes visual voicemail software, recently hit two milestones in its short history.
The company said it eclipsed $12 million in equity and debt financing and surpassed 1 billion phone calls answered for its users.
Irvine-based Tech Coast Angels, Silicon Valley’s VantagePoint Capital Partners and Siemer Ventures in Santa Monica all took part in the latest financing round, with the total undisclosed.
YouMail will use the money to roll out a network of mobile applications and services, and expand its flagship software program Visual Voicemail Plus, according to Chief Executive Alex Quilici.
The company’s applications support smartphones such as iPhone, BlackBerry and Google Android devices, and other mobile operating systems.
YouMail was started in 2007.
SRS Gets Natural
Santa Ana-based SRS Labs Inc.’s latest mobile application allows users to experience the sights and sounds of popular world destinations in surround sound.
The app, dubbed the Relaxation Portal, is animated, colorful and user-friendly.
The free version includes four locations: Amazon rainforest, Crete, Martha’s Vineyard and Namibia.
Caution on “Key” Customer
Anaheim’s Multi-Fineline Electronix Inc., commonly referred to as M-Flex, cut its sales projection for the June quarter to about $191 million, down from prior guidance of $200 million to $220 million.
Analysts were expecting revenue of about $210 million.
The tempered outlook stems from a drop in demand from a “key” customer late last month, according to M-Flex Chief Executive Reza Meshgin.
M-Flex doesn’t disclose customers, although Apple Inc. and Research in Motion Ltd., the maker of Blackberry phones, are known to use the company’s circuit boards.
The company’s circuit boards are flexible, which makes them easier to design into phones, barcode scanners and other devices.
Higher seasonal demand is projected to increase sales in the September quarter, Meshgin said.
M-Flex is part of Singapore’s WBL Corp., a holding company that operates technology and other businesses. WBL owns 62% of M-Flex’s publicly traded shares and a third of the company’s voting stock.
The company once produced most of its circuit boards at its Anaheim headquarters, which still does prototypes and more complex jobs. Much of the rest of production has shifted to China in the past several years.
The company got its start in Anaheim in 1984.
M-Flex went public in 2004.
