Analysis of Mergers and Acquisitions Trends in the Semiconductor Industry with the Technology Perspective

Technology-driven Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are important for open innovation because they provide companies with external innovation resources. Recently, in the era of Industry 4.0, M&A deals become more and larger for landscape changing in the semiconductor industry. This paper aims at understanding the motivations and trends of this phenomenon from the technology perspective. In this paper, we mainly focus on the semiconductor industries in both the U.S. and Japan because the two countries are famous for the semiconductor. In order to cover the whole situation, we linked the "Assignee/Applicant" of the Derwent Innovation patent database and company names of a company database for analysis. We achieved this by splitting names into two parts for calculating similarity and matching. With the linkage of the two databases, we dealt data with network science and logistic regression. These practices helped to detect the differences of technology development level between the two countries. Furthermore, with natural language processing, we identified several technology keywords/fields which have influenced M&A in the semiconductor industry recently. Based on these findings, we argue that the future semiconductor industry will meet the diversified needs from society and that in the semiconductor industry, vertical and horizontal M&A prevail alternately.