Rudolph And Nanometrics Hoping To Unlock A Little M&A Synergy Magic

As the complexity of chip design continues to intensify, it's requiring more and more R&D from semiconductor equipment companies to keep pace, and that is making scale a more significant competitive factor - memory, foundry, and logic companies want "partners" (and yes, I use quotations deliberately there) that they can trust to deliver the goods, and that's making it harder for small players to stay in game. To that end, the combination of Rudolph Technologies (RTEC) and Nanometrics (NANO) announced earlier this week certainly makes some sense as a way for both companies to stay competitive in the process control/metrology/inspection markets they serve.

Whether the two companies will achieve their synergy goals from the deal is, of course, an open question now. The expense synergy targets look reasonable at first blush, but integrating operations will still offer challenges and the revenue synergies may prove harder to achieve than it would seem at first blush. For me, this is a "don't love it, don't hate … but I get it" sort of transaction, and the new Rudolph (the surviving entity) will be a name worth watching as the semiconductor equipment (or SCE) space recovers.

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Rudolph And Nanometrics Hoping To Unlock A Little M&A Synergy Magic