Report: China company bids $23B for Micron

Elizabeth Weise | USA TODAY

A Chinese chip design company has submitted a $23 billion bid for Idaho-based Micron Technology. If the deal goes through, it would be the largest Chinese purchase of a U.S. company, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Tsinghua Unigroup offered $21 a share for Micron, almost 19% over its Monday closing price, the Journal said in a report mid-evening ET on Monday.

A subsequent report Monday night by a Yahoo Finance contributor, however, identified a Micron spokesman, Daniel Francisco, as saying the company had "not received an offer."

Beijing-based Tsinghua Unigroup is state-owned. It was one of the companies created when China launched a policy of spinning-off university-owned companies in the 2000s.

The company's origins are at Tsinghua University, one of China's preeminent technical universities, sometimes called the MIT of China.

China's Shuanghui Internationalbought Smithfield Foods for $4.7 billion in 2013.

"I think this is enormous. Not only because of the size of it, but because a Chinese company is investing so much in such an important piece of technology," said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy in Austin, Texas.

The Boise, Idaho company is the last major U.S. maker of memory and storage chips used in PCs, workstations, smartphones, tablets and cameras.

The bid is likely in part due to "a government decree that any government agencies or highly regulated industries need to have end-to-end control of their technology," said Moor.

The Micron purchase "essentially is China taking control of a major piece of an entire hardware solution that they didn't have before--memory" he said.

Micron lost $18 million in the fiscal third quarter, with profits falling 39%, in part because of the slowing of the PC market.

A Gartner Group report issued last week found a 9.5% decline in PC sales worldwide in the second quarter of 2015 as compared to the second quarter of 2014.