Sources: Broadcom is no longer in talks to buy SAS after the founders of SAS had a change of heart and decided not to sell to Broadcom
Cara Lombardo / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This reversal lands one day after reports that Broadcom was in talks to buy SAS at a valuation between $15B and $20B — and it breaks off not over price but because SAS's founders changed their minds about selling. For a closely held firm whose founders are the sellers of record, that is the one lever no acquirer can negotiate around.
It also rhymes with Broadcom's recent M&A history: in 2019, whole-company negotiations with Symantec collapsed, and weeks later Broadcom returned to buy only Symantec's enterprise business for $10B. The Brocade acquisition in 2017 shows the completed deals happen too — Broadcom walks away when terms don't fit, then sometimes re-engages on different structure.
First-order effects
- SAS stays founder-owned, and the reported $15B–$20B price discovery from this week's talks now hangs over the company without a buyer attached.
- Broadcom loses its path to adding SAS's analytics, BI and data-management software to its infrastructure-software portfolio, keeping its software expansion limited to deals like Symantec's enterprise unit and Brocade.
Second-order effects
- If Broadcom still wants SAS's data-management assets, the Symantec precedent points to a narrower structure — a carve-out of specific product lines rather than the whole firm — though any renewed approach depends entirely on the founders.
- Rival analytics and BI vendors dodge a competitor newly backed by Broadcom's cost-disciplined operating model, leaving the competitive map in enterprise analytics unchanged for now.
Third-order effects
- Founder-controlled private software firms are showing they can entertain billion-dollar bids and decline them, a check on the consolidation wave rolling through enterprise software where strategics have been the main exit.
- For serial acquirers like Broadcom, willingness to walk — twice now, per the Symantec episode — signals that price discipline governs software M&A more than portfolio ambition does.
The trend: Enterprise software consolidation keeps producing collapsed and restructured deals, with founders and price discipline — not strategic hunger — deciding which targets actually change hands.