By Chris Ciufo — Freescale’s shareholders recently approved the $40/share acquisition “merger” of the company to a consortium of private equity firms.
As of 11/13/06, 73% of the outstanding shares entitled to be voted were cast in favor of the consortium composed of The Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group, Permira Funds, and Texas Pacific Group. With sales of an estimated $5.8 billion, Freescale is one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies, and the company’s PowerPC processors are among the most popular in high performance VME-based embedded military applications such as SIGINT, ELINT, radar and sonar processing.