LONDON – Peter Bauer, is CEO of Infineon Technologies AG (Munich, Germany) until the end of the fourth fiscal quarter on September 30, 2012. He has been one of the more successful chip company CEOs on the European scene, although, like all the current crop, he was not a big-time investor.
Bauer is stepping down for health reasons and hands over to fellow management board member Reinhard Ploss (see
Ailing Bauer resigns as Infineon CEO).
And so we have probably heard the last quarterly results statements from Bauer. When it comes to the fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year statements in late October Ploss will be in the CEO's seat.
As indicated above Bauer was not in the "build-it-and-they-come" camp. And he downsized Infineon significantly with the sale of the wireless business unit to Intel, but he had also focused on automotive, power, and industrial semiconductors, the things that Infineon was good at that also showed steady growth with the prospect of some margin. He also focused geographically on Asia Pacific and China in particular, something that had echoes of his erstwhile colleague and former Infineon CEO Ulrich Schumacher.
Bauer's execution was good and as a result Infineon is profitable and in the best shape of the leading European chip makers. It is therefore a shame that he had to end his time as CEO with rumblings about
"further measures."
Peter Bauer, outgoing CEO at Infineon Altis, NXP to help car talk unto carAltis Semiconductor SA (Corbeil-Essonnes, France), the specialty foundry bought by French entrepreneur Yazid Sabeg from IBM and Infineon Technologies in 2010, has landed an interesting contract. It is going to be making vehicle-to-vehicle radio frequency transceivers for startup Autotalks Ltd. (Kfar-Netter, Israel).
The Pluton transceiver, together with the Craton communications controller make an automotive modem that could be used for vehicle-to-vehicle communications in 2015 model automobiles.
Autotalks has selected Catena Holding BV (Delft, The Netherlands), now part of NXP Semiconductors NV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), for circuit and system design. Altis will manufacture in a 130-nm RF CMOS process.
The Pluton transceiver is specified to work in U.S., Europe, Japan and Korea and does so in the 5.8-GHz to 5.9-GHz and 760-MHz bands. Pluton samples are expected to be available in 1H13 and to achieve AEC-Q100 automotive qualification in early 2014.
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Ailing Bauer resigns as Infineon CEO
Infineon freezes headcount, mulls 'further measures'