Tokyo Electron Ltd. (TEL) announced that at its board of directors’ meeting held today, the company resolved to terminate the agreement with Applied Materials Inc. to combine their respective businesses through a merger of equals. The combined entity was to have been called ETERIS.
TEL said it had worked with Applied Materials to discuss the combination agreement with government authorities in several jurisdictions. “However,” TEL said in a press release, “there remains a gap between the view of Tokyo Electron and Applied Materials and the view of the United States Department of Justice, and it becomes apparent that such gap will not be able to be bridged.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that the deal, announced in September 2013, would have created a company with a market value of $29 billion. The Journal quotes Gary Dickerson, president and chief executive officer of Applied Materials, as saying, “We viewed the merger as an opportunity to accelerate our strategy and worked hard to make it happen.”
