(credit: Qualcomm)

Smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm confirmed on Thursday that it planned to buy NXP Semiconductor for an enterprise value of £38 billion (~$47 billion)—eclipsing SoftBank’s recent mega bucks acquisition of British chip designer ARM Holdings.

It told Wall Street that the combined company expected to report annual sales of £24 billion ($30 billion), with plans to bullishly elbow its way into “leadership positions across mobile, automotive, IoT, security, RF [radio frequency], and networking.”

Dutch NXP, which co-invented near-field communication (NFC), has 44,000 employees on its books worldwide. Its controllers are heavily used in Android and Apple smartphones. The planned merger comes a year after NXP bought Freescale Semiconductor for £9.25 billion.