Skyworks Solutions Inc. (SWKS)

[bar1080]

Not only Intel but MSFT and Google have done tons of acquisitions. I was just looking at the list that went back 20 years. Think how much they overpaid for tech stuff in the late 90s. Plenty of tech stocks do almost no acquisitions. When I'm talking about acquisitions I'm thinking of the kind of costly takeover fights and bidding wars from years ago. High flying tech stocks can do acquisitions sensibly if they pay with their inflated stock as was common long ago, stock at 30X to 50X PE. SWKS is cheap at <20 X earnings.

There have been plenty of laughable buys. I remember Quaker Oats paying $1.7 billion for Snapple in 1994 and selling it for $300 million two years later. I bet Macy's wishes they'd never done any of their department store chain buys a decade or two ago.

The worst may have been Bank of America grabbing Countrywide in 2008. They paid $2.5 billion and it cost them $40 billion. That's one (of many) reasons I don't trust bank management.

Another hideous disaster was Verisign's $21 billion acquisition of web registrar Networks Solutions in 2000 just as the bubble was breaking. A few years later it reportedly resold for just $800 million.