Tech M&A King Cisco (CSCO) Pushes Into The Living Room

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) may control most of the global router and enterprise video conferencing business, but it wants a bigger footprint in home video delivery. Silicon Valley’s biggest M&A machine has snapped up China set-top box company DVN for $44.5 million.

Cisco already has a large set-top business in the US, but the Chinese market has 160 million cable subscribers and that makes it the most promising market for set-top sales in the world.

Cisco is entering a market that is already crowded with video download services, but most of them do not have a major presence in China. Operations such as Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) have their large customer bases in the US.

The focus of US companies on China’s huge consumer electronics industry follows moves by American car companies into what is now the largest auto market in the world, and the move by US handset companies to like Apple to try to take a piece of the 700 million cellular customers in the world’s most populous country. Even the US PC industry is pressing harder for Chinese business even though local companies including Lenovo and Acer are top suppliers of both consumers and businesses. Even so, Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) and HP (NYSE:HPQ) see important opportunities in the massive China market

So, Cisco has its beach head in China’s set-top market. Local competition will not like that.  A set-top war in China? Why not?

Douglas A. McIntyre