Three no Trump: China says it's 'open' to giving Qualcomm-NXP wedding its blessing

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Dutch semiconductor maker NXP

Qualcomm is a special case for US regulators. They do quite a bit of *cough* "special" *cough* work for various three-letter-agencies of the US government, so those regulators are "guided" in their decisions by forces other than consumer interest. That much a fairly open secret in the industry.

As for the NXP deal, that's a different question. The US probably likes that as a way of getting more fabs that can handle the various special projects that Qualcomm does for the US government. There aren't many of those fabs these days, especially with IBM paying Global Foundries to take its fabs (note all the special qualifications on GF keeping some of the fabs that do DoD work that were embedded in that deal). If Qualcomm could make a go of older fabs for some of their work (and older fabs are often better for things like RF) and use them for various special projects, then we should have no doubt that the US regulators would be told by various agencies that the deal needs to go through no matter what.