It had been suggested that Freescale’s purchasers saw a way to make their money back by taking Freescale fabless, but Denis Griot, senior vice president and general manager at Freescale, said: “We are still fabbing 80 per cent internally. I think it will work at 70:30 but don’t see any dramatic change.”
According to Satoru Ito, CEO of Renesas Technology: “It’s a sign that the semiconductor industry is becoming more stabilised. But the fact that they bought at those values was kind of a surprise to me.”
Wim Roelandts, CEO of Xilinx, saw little merit in such buy-outs in general: “If you have a down-cycle in the semiconductor industry, these investments are going to look very foolish.”
The private equity purchasers of NXP and Freescale are claiming that they made their acquisitions at the bottom of the cycle. Roelandts disagrees: “If anything we are probably at the top of the cycle”, he says, “people are talking about a downturn in 2007/2008.”
