They derive from HP and Agilent Technologies, along with LSI. Pieced together originally by KKR & Silver Lake. Realistically it's a half century old entity. They then moved the corporation official seat to Singapore for various strategic reasons.
Calling Avago "virtually unknown" might have been too dismissive from my part.
But lets consider 2013. Avago had a revenue of $2.5bn, respectable, but that's not much when compared with Qualcomm's $24.9bn, less than Broadcom's $8.3bn, NXP's $4.8bn, and Freescale's $4.1bn.
In fact it seems that at least when it came to revenues, Avago was the smallest company on that list.
Pretty cool to see those revenue numbers. I assumed Avago would have been bigger revenue wise than NXP and Freescale (even with assuming you're using 2016 not 2013 revenue for them)
Qualcomm has had commercials. Sometimes in pricey spots. They also have or had one or two stadium naming rights. So at least they'd be known by name (vaguely) by a decent percentage of Americans. Though would they know what Qualcomm does at all like even just "something with mobile devices"? No clue.
Not really a retort. Just Qualcomm is at least known perhaps more than all the other companies combined. As little as that's worth.
They derive from HP and Agilent Technologies, along with LSI. Pieced together originally by KKR & Silver Lake. Realistically it's a half century old entity. They then moved the corporation official seat to Singapore for various strategic reasons.