Brocade Looks Like Another Typical Broadcom (Avago) Deal

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) (or more precisely, the company previously known as Avago) knows what it wants in M&A and is not afraid to go for it. Management loves to find companies with few competitors, stable revenue, cost synergy potential, and a product/market assortment that slots in opportunistically with the existing business. So even allowing for an ongoing shift away from fibre channel toward Ethernet, Brocade (NASDAQ:BRCD) checks the boxes that Broadcom looks for and looks like a solidly accretive deal.

The Brocade deal appears to add around $10/share to my fair value estimate for Broadcom, and even if Brocade's fibre channel SAN switch business should suffer even greater erosion from the adoption of Ethernet switches, Broadcom has strong existing products there as well. The biggest downside I see to this deal is that it limits Broadcom's short-term M&A options. A rival bid for NXP (NASDAQ:NXPI) (which was not too likely either way) now seems even less likely and likely so too a bid for a company like Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX) that could more meaningfully broaden Broadcom's horizons.

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Brocade Looks Like Another Typical Broadcom (Avago) Deal