Kenton J. King

A dean of Silicon Valley dealmakers, King has been at Skadden since 1988 as the tech industry grew, matured and now consolidates. He is an authority on mergers and acquisitions along with corporate governance.

The pandemic didn’t slow his practice.

“I’ve been surprised at how much we were able to get done in a pandemic,” King said. “It was a real stressor for people to be at home, dealing with work and life. Now we’re all ready for it to be over—but it appears it’s not ready to be over.”

He represents Xilinx Inc. in its $35 billion all-stock acquisition by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the second-largest such deal of 2020 and what Skadden identified as the fourth-largest technology deal ever. San Jose-based Xilinx makes programmable chips; its union with nearby Santa Clara-based AMD results in a combined Silicon Valley powerhouse valued at nearly $135 billion.

“It’s an overused term, but this was a transformative deal for the industry,” King said, “uniting complementary parts of the semiconductor sector to create a significant competitor in an industry that is consolidating.”

Xilinx and AMD had been in talks for a couple of years, King said, “but stock-for-stock deals with valuations bouncing around are hard to do. The stars happened to align during the pandemic. A lot of what has to work is getting the integration right, and those are conversations harder to have via Zoom. But it’s certainly a good example of people learning to cope in a crisis.”

King advised technology and IP-licensing company Xperi Corp. in its $3 billion merger-of-equals with digital video recorder pioneer TiVo Corp., a deal that created one of the largest patent licensing companies on earth.

And the transaction might not be complete. “Both companies have products to sell to customers and both have an IP business as well for licensing. Each was probably sub-scale but by combining each reached a more appropriate scale. Now that they have merged, there is talk of dividing them again into a licensing business and a products business. So there’s a potential part two, but that’s not baked in.”

King also represented fiber-network infrastructure company Zayo Group Holdings Inc. in its $14.3 billion sale to private equity funds. “We had competing consortia, and that was a really, really complicated deal,” he said.

“In short, there seemed to be more than my fair share of challenging situations,” King said. “It’s a way to keep young.”

--John Roemer