Apple: RBC, ISI See Advantages In Anobit Buy

RBC Capital’s Mike Abramsky this morning reflects on�speculation reported by TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters, who cited the Israeli publication Calcalist, that Apple (AAPL) is in talks to buy component maker Anobit of Herzliya Pituach, Israel, for upwards of half a billion dollars.

Abramsky writes that this reminds him of Apple’s April, 2008 acquisition of PA Semiconductor, the Silicon Valley startup whose chip innovations helped fuel Apple’s “A” series of processors used in its iOS devices.

Abramsky notes that in Anobit’s flash microcontroller chips, “Anobit utilizes proprietary signal processing algorithms to improve reliability, performance and reduce the cost of flash solutions. Anobit closed $32M financing with Intel Capital in November 2010, bringing total funding to over $70M.”

He opines that a deal, if it comes to pass, “may provide meaningful long-term competitive advantages. Apple likely sees flash memory performance and speed as crucial to user experience in the post-PC era.”

Apple shares this morning are up $1.06, or 0.3%, at $392.90.

Update:

ISI Group’s Brian Marshall this morning writes that a purchase at the reported price would be something of a deal, as the implied multiple is six times the amount of venture money invested in Anobit, $80 million, which would be less than the seven times multiple that SanDisk (SNDK) paid for Pliant Technology in May of this year.

Like Abramsky, he sees a parallel with PA Semi.

“We believe Anobit’s key asset is their embedded consumer flash controller technology called MSP (e.g., memory signal processing) used in smartphones and tablets (e.g., 666 MB/s data transfer, low power, supports 256GB or 16 flash dies and <20nm MLC/TLC technologies),” writes Marshall.

Anobit’s technology competes with that of chip makers Marvell Technology Group (MRVL) and LSI (LSI), he writes. LSI recently bought a company called SandForce for $370 million, he notes

There are even applications beyond client devices, he notes:

The company also addresses the enterprise SSD market with its Genesis SSD leveraging its MSP controller chip (e.g., 2.5″ 6Gb/s SATA and SAS available in 100/200/400GB capacities) which competes against STEC, Samsung, Hynix, Micron, etc.