|
|||
|
|
|
Growth Eyed at Fairchild Fairchild shopping for an analog business By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times South Portland, Me. -- Less than a year after being spun out from National Semiconductor Corp., Fairchild Semiconductor is looking to acquire an analog business that fits the company's focus on the commodity market. In an interview, Fairchild president and chief executive officer Kirk Pond said that the company sees 50 to 60 possible acquisition targets, identified on its own and with help from its main investor: Citicorp Venture Capital Ltd. Among them, Pond said, is struggling Telefunken Microelectronic GmbH, known as Temic (Heilbronn, Germany), a subsidiary of Daimler-Benz A.G. "They're on the market," he said, "and it's been brought to our attention." Fairchild is also keeping close watch on a broad line of semiconductor suppliers that may be interested in offloading their analog business. Pond said recent restructurings by National, Advanced Micro Devices, Motorola's semiconductor group and Texas Instruments indicate that broad-line suppliers are focusing more on high-margin core products rather than on low-priced, high-volume "multimarket" products that require substantial customer support, Pond said. "There may be some opportunities that are going to come up very quickly that we're going to jump on," he said. The biggest challenge is finding one that is affordable. "The market caps on some analog companies are pretty rich," Pond said. "So we'd probably have to find a little one, or one that's being carved out." In the meantime, Fairchild hopes that adding analog to its line--made up of logic, discrete and nonvolatile E2PROM and EPROM memory products that sell in the billions of units--will mean faster growth. Sales are expected to rise to $800 million from $700 million last year, but Pond said the company would rather see its annual revenue growth exceed 20 percent. "Our strategy is to become the premier multimarket semiconductor supplier in the world, and we know we can't do that growing at 10 to 15 percent a year," Pond said. Beyond acquisitions, the company seeks to expand its repertoire by rapidly churning out products. In the past year, Fairchild has introduced more than 100 products, and it's exploring moves into such markets as low-end microcontrollers and low-density flash. (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
|
|
|
© Copyright 1995-2000, The Motley Fool. All rights reserved. This material is for personal use only. Republication and redissemination, including posting to news groups, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of The Motley Fool. The Motley Fool is a registered trademark and the "Fool" logo is a trademark of The Motley Fool, Inc. Contact Us
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..