Intersil Leads the Way

I had the great opportunity to talk with Dave Bell, CEO of Intersil at the Globalpress event held in Santa Cruz, California. The last time I met Dave was at the last electronica exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 2008. Much has happened since then.

At electronica - way back in 2008, I spoke with Dave who gave me a powerful message that I was both excited and cautious about. He told me very clearly that the company was rapidly expanding its areas of activity and was well on track in achieving this through internal restructuring to integrate its acquisitions. The company at that time was cash rich, aggressive and hungry for expansion. I remember thinking at the time that this was indeed a powerful combination as most companies were ‘hunkering down' fearing the worst of recession. Now in 2010, in California, Dave presented his innovative, view of the road to recovery in the semiconductor industry, where he outlined his view of how Intersil would experience the recovery, by gaining 7-8% per annum certainly until end of 2011. This he called the ‘swoosh' recovery curve with demand coming from new market drivers such as video, security and power and its conservation.

He explained that video traffic is already giving service providers problems of overload: In New York there are still problems with dropped calls due to bandwidth congestion through the increasing number of video downloads from mobile users.

Intersil is well placed to take business in all these sectors and with Dave's aggressive takeover campaign; the company now has all the boxes ticked to achieve the ‘swoosh' recovery presented by Dave. When I talked about this with Dave, I raised the point that not all takeovers turned out to be ‘happy marriages'. I have experienced some quite brutal takeovers with the company taken over is force-fitted into the parent company structure or on the other hand, where no-one takes ownership for the takeover and the purchased company resource alienated and left out to dry. Not so with Intersil, corrected Dave. Companies are not merely absorbed, but the existing culture is respected and indeed encouraged as another dimension for Intersil's growth. Naturally the tools and processes are unified but this is something that is considered at the outset and normally results in a better resource for the ‘new kids on the block'. Certainly in my subsequent discussions with the folks from Zilker Labs, this seems very much to be the case.

With these acquisitions, Intersil is stronger than ever. But Dave is still always on the lookout for engineering talent. Many companies are having difficulty in attracting good engineers; Intersil is still recruiting engineers with top grades from top colleges such as MIT, Stanford Georgia and Virginia Techs. Something is right here. The future looks bright. I look forward to my next update with Dave Bell. www.intersil.com