HOW COULD A BALANCED SCORECARD BENEFIT BROADCOM? Jointly headquartered in San Jose, California,…

HOW COULD A BALANCED SCORECARD BENEFIT BROADCOM?

Jointly headquartered in San Jose, California, and Singapore, Broadcom Technologies (earlier known as Avago Technologies) designs, develops, and supplies analogue, digital, and optoelectronics components and systems. In May 2015, Avago had announced its plans to acquire Broadcom Technologies for $37 billion (a combination of $17 billion cash and $20 billion in shares). This acquisition significantly increased Broadcom’s patent position in sectors like communication technologies, making it the ninth largest patent-holder in semiconductor vendor’s category. Broadcom’s varied product portfolio has four target markets, including wireless communications, enterprise storage, wired infrastructure, and industrial. In August 2015, Broadcom announced the release of products—40G bidirectional (BiDi) multimode fiber (MMF) QSFP + transceiver module, and the AFBR-79EBPZ—that were designed for high-speed data center interconnect and networking applications. Broadcom provided a cost-effective solution to upgrade Ethernet in the data center with its 40 GbE links on existing LC duplex multimode fiber.

In October 2015, Broadcom Technologies released an industry-first new multi-reader HDD read channel in silicon, supporting product development of next-generation HDD controllers with highperformance data rates and enabling Array Reader Magnetic Recording (ARMR) to provide densities greater than 1.3 Tb/in2 . Capacity gains enabled by the HDD read channels are almost 10 times more than the previous generation channel technologies. In addition to this, the new technology is more cost-effective than the previous single-reader HDD system on chips (SoCs); the new technology doesn’t have any performance limitations, making it ideal for deploying in all HDD enterprise and consumer markets.

Questions

1. On Broadcom’s website, under the leadership section, the company reveals its top executives. A balanced scorecard sometimes examines the number of men versus women in the hierarchy. What is the breakdown for Broadcom? Is this good management? Are there minorities represented?

2. From the corporate website, assess the extent that Broadcom does an effective job evaluating strategies.