• Acceptance granted in early August
• Wireless connectivity chips emerge as key focus

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has formally accepted Texas Instruments’ (TI) merger filing for its proposed acquisition of Silicon Labs (SLAB), two sources familiar with the matter said.

The acceptance took place in early August under the agency’s normal review procedure, both sources said.

Announced on 4 February, the USD 7.5bn deal is expected to close in 1H27, subject to regulatory approvals including China’s antitrust approval. TI is a leading supplier of analogue and embedded processing semiconductors used in industrial, automotive, and consumer electronics applications. SLAB is a fabless semiconductor company specializing in low-power wireless connectivity chips for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The deal parties submitted their filing to SAMR in April, as reported. Based on this timeline, SAMR took approximately three to four months to formally accept the deal for review, consistent with the agency’s typical practice for complex semiconductor transactions.

SAMR’s requests for information (RFIs) to the deal parties during the pre-acceptance period covered a broad range of issues, with wireless connectivity chips as a key focus area, a third source familiar with the matter said. The deal has attracted a lot of attention from SAMR and participants in China’s semiconductor industry, the third source said, without further elaboration.

A fourth source familiar with the matter confirmed the presence of strong domestic complainants and said that the deal involved complex and overlapping product portfolios. However, the source noted that the parties’ respective market share across the relevant product segments do not appear to be sufficiently high to raise obvious market concerns on their own.

TI and SLAB did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

SAMR does not comment on ongoing deals.