The well-known American developer of semiconductor products Broadcom has officially announced the purchase of VMware, the largest developer of software for virtualization. This agreement is expected to be one of the three most expensive technology acquisitions in history.

According to the official press release, the purchase price will be $61 billion. The most expensive in the technological world were only agreements between Dell and EMC ($67 billion) and Microsoft with Activision Blizzard ($68.7 billion).

VMware shareholders are known to receive $142.50 in cash or 0.2520 shares of Broadcom common stock for each VMware share. At the same time, approximately half of VMware shares will be redeemed in cash, and the other half will be exchanged for common shares of Broadcom.

As a result of the transaction, Broadcom shareholders will receive approximately 88% of the shares of VMware, and current VMware shareholders – about 12% of the shares of the combined company.

The merger of the two tech giants will allow Broadcom to strengthen and develop its own software division. The company intends to rebrand it to VMware and integrate its existing infrastructure and software into VMware to ensure security.

The agreement will close in fiscal year 2023. True, for this it must be approved by regulatory authorities. This is not Broadcom’s first major purchase.

In 2018, it bought CA Technologies software development for $18.9 billion, and a year later, Symantec for $10.7 billion. However, less than six months later, she resold Symantec to Accenture for an undisclosed amount.