Qualcomm will not take over the Israeli maker of car chips, Autotalks, after all. The two companies announced the planned acquisition last year, but Qualcomm believes it cannot obtain the required approval.
The $350 million deal will therefore not go ahead, reports Reuters. “Qualcomm has terminated the transaction to acquire Autotalks because we did not receive timely approval from authorities,” the company said in a statement. The company emphasizes that the car market remains important.
Qualcomm announced last year that it wanted to acquire Autotalks. Autotalks is one fabless chip company founded in 2009. The company focuses on vehicle-to-everything communication chips. Such V2X chips allow vehicles such as cars to communicate with other vehicles and with their environment. They are used in car safety systems and are intended, among other things, to reduce collisions, for example by detecting vehicles in a driver’s blind spot.
The British market regulator, among others, announced an investigation into the deal, but regulators in fifteen European countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium, were also looking at the planned takeover. It is common for companies to agree on a deadline by which an acquisition must be completed.
