With Blackstone astonishing, and alarming, some in the semiconductor industry with the size of the price it paid for Freescale, will it get its sums right in a newly rumoured bid it is said to be entertaining for a controlling stake in India's third largest wirless telephone network operator?
Blackstone, the private equity firm which recently bought Freescale very expensively ($17.6bn) is reported to be part of a consortium making a bid for a 67 per cent stake, probably worth $8bn, in Hutchison Essar, the third largest wireless network operator in India..
With many in the semiconductor industry highly surprised at the price paid for Freescale compared with the $11.6bn paid for similarly-sized NXP, and with many Freescale customers worried that the company won’t be able to pay back the interest on the billions of dollars of debt loaded onto Freescale, especially if there’s an industry downturn, it is to be hoped that Blackstone and its colleagues have got their sums right in this new bid.
Do they know, for instance, that the cost of one minute’s talk time in India will be less than 1US cent by the end of the decade – according to estimates of MEDEA+ the European high-tech body.
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