Semiconductor maker Broadcom announced this week that it has hired investment bank JP Morgan to help it exit the market for mobile baseband processors following years of unprofitability blamed on intense competition from the likes of  Qualcomm and Intel. The move sent the company’s shares soaring 10 percent to over $35.

Broadcom hopes to sell its baseband business, which presently employs around 3,000 engineers, but signalled that it will simply pull the cord if no buyer is found. The wind-down is expected to save the firm roughly $700 million annually, including $100 million in estimated reductions in stock-based compensation. Of that, about $50 million will be reinvested each year in growing its broadband, infrastructure and wireless divisions.

The announcement marks an anti-climatic end to Broadcom’s efforts to compete in the baseband market. The company spent a massive $3 billion on developing cellular connectivity chips over the last seven years, according to data from Strategy Analytics. And last October, it shelled out another $164 million for the LTE assets of Japan’s well-regarded Renesas Electronics in a last-ditch attempt to escape the competitive death spiral, but to no avail.

Leaving the baseband market will allow Broadcom to focus on more profitable areas like the enterprise, where increasing interest in software-defined networking is driving demand for programmable switches that can match the management flexibility facilitated by virtualization over in the compute layer. The company’s response is OF-DPA, a switch specification that uses the OpenFlow communications protocol, which decouples the control plane from the physical infrastructure on which it runs to simplify management.  The design is meant to enable network virtualization use cases on top of its StrataXGS line of Ethernet switches.

image via Broadcom