Why would Freescale become a "used to be good" company as a part of NXP? NXP is a pretty cool company IMO. They make lots of cool tech and they got out of the "split off from Philips and take all our debt with you" turd of a deal remarkably well.
(For the interested, NXP used to be Philips Semiconductors. Philips wanted to cut them away because it was an unprofitable division so they sold it to some hedge funds, including a shit ton of debt. Afair, something like 20% of their annual expenses were interest only, putting a big damper on their freedom to innovate. So NXP in turn cut away its unprofitable subdivisions, and became or stayed remarkably competitive in the others. With an inheritance of relatively expensive R&D (no Chinese wages) and a Philips culture (= highly bureaucratic and hierachical), that is no small feat)
To me, an uneducated observer, the fact that NXP now feels in shape to do big acquisitions is a pretty good signal. These guys are on the rise, and that may not be bad for Freescale at all.
But I think, this was regular Hedge Fund strategy of buying companies. Take a ton of money from the financial market. Buy off a company or subsidiary and pay with the borrowed money. Then put all that on dept to the bought company.
That was the way it also worked when the Hedge Fonds bought it out of Philips.
Just checked the market capital and it's actually NXPI=2*FSL, NXP and FSL are both spin-offs, both got a lot of hedge-fund debt, but it seems NXP did better than FSL in the last few years.
