Craig Wolf, Poughkeepsie Journal 8:33 p.m. EDT June 30, 2015
GlobalFoundries has announced that it has received the final governmental approval to acquire IBM Corp.'s microelectronics manufacturing business.
The deal is expected to close soon, GlobalFoundries said.
The Poughkeepsie Journal previously reported the deal was to close on July 1, based on several sources in a position to know the plans. Neither company has confirmed a date, however.
The company, which has a major chip plant in Malta, Saratoga County, announced in October along with IBM that it would acquire the fabricating plants and several thousand employees, patents and business connections from IBM.
In a reverse of the usual situation, IBM will pay Global $1.5 billlion to take over the business, which remains important to Big Blue as a supplier of semiconductor chips used in products like the mainframe computers made in Poughkeepsie.
That includes the East Fishkill complex, where IBM makes chips for its own machines and for customers.
The announcement posted Monday by GlobalFoundries noted that it now has all the federal or governmental approvals needed to complete the transaction.
The federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States gave its approval for the proposed acquisition of IBM’s microelectronics business, and with the completion of that review, "the companies have completed the regulatory process in the United States. All necessary regulatory approvals outside the United States were previously received," the statement said.
That committee consists of nine federal agencies' representatives who assess whether the United States' interests are jeopardized by foreign ownership of an American business. GlobalFoundries is owned by Mubadala, a company that was established by the government of Abu Dhabi to diversify that nation's economy.
IBM's statement said, "This transaction, once final, enables IBM to further focus on systems innovation and fundamental semiconductor research and development to power future cloud, mobile, and big data workloads. GlobalFoundries will have access to the research resulting from this investment through the companies' collaboration with other industry leaders at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, in Albany."
In Dutchess County, where the East Fishkill plant employs several thousand people, the majority of them are to become employees of GlobalFoundries as the deal closes.
Those who are transferring will have their last IBM day Tuesday and become employees of GlobalFoundries on Wednesday, said Ron Hicks, Dutchess County's deputy commissioner for strategic planning and economic development.
He said he hopes that GlobalFoundries will pick up where IBM left off in plans to engage a national-level developer to help with attracting users to empty buildings or spaces on the site. That process, started by IBM, came to a halt when the talks with GlobalFoundries became serious, Hicks said. He also hopes GlobalFoundries will give serious thought to redevelopment of the site as a semiconductor complex, which is what it has been since IBM established it in the 1960s.
The potential is that the site could give birth to a new generation of jobs, Hicks said.
