tech industry
09/27/2006, 12:40pm, EDT
Wednesday, September 27th
Woz's Acquicor buys semiconductor firm
Acquicor Technology -- an equity firm headed by three former Apple executives, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak -- today announced that it has acquired foundry provider Jazz Semiconductor for $260 million in cash. The three former Apple execs leading Acquicor include Gilbert Amelio, Ellen Hancock, and Steve "Woz" Wozniak. Acquicor -- also known as the "blank check" equity firm -- intends to focus on acquisitions in the technology sector, rather than manufacturing or selling products. Jazz Semiconductor is to become a subsidiary of Acquicor once the merger completes, and because Acquicor is a publicly traded company, Jazz Semiconductor will cease pursuit of its initial public offering, withdrawing its registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to eeTimes online.
Amelio will maintain his role as CEO and chairman of Acquicor, while Hancock plans to remain chief operating officer and president of Acquicor. Steve Wozniak will continue to serve as chief technology officer of the equity firm. Shu Li, president and CEO of Jazz Semiconductor since 2002, will continue in his role as well, according to the report. Amelio was decidedly positive about the acquisition.
"Jazz is poised to take advantage of growth opportunities for innovative specialty foundry services," he said.
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I guess Acquicor has no plans of becoming profitable huh?
Amelio had such a huge task of fixing previous management screwups that it would take years for the positive results of a profitable Apple to show. He was no charismatic CEO like Jobs but he had the operational expertise needed to stop Apple from hemorraging further.
When he became Apple CEO, the companies financial situation was a mess. Much of that was due to years of previous mismanagement during Michael Spindler's tenure. The accumulation of those problems and fixing them don't happen overnight. The channel stuffing incident with the Performa's was one of those and once Amelio and Fred Anderson (CFO hired by Amelio) discovered that, did the correct but difficult thing of writing those off leading to that massive loss. Amelio also had to make unpopular changes which included canning some of the luxurious perks. He also had to deal with uncooperative management and personnel who did not like the changes since many weren't used to accountability.
When they decided on purchasing NeXT and bringing back Jobs as a technical advisor, Jobs took advantage of this fact since Amelio would be stuck having to do the dirty work. It is no surprise that Jobs undermined Amelio once the time was right and most of the dirty operational work had been done. Amelio was the one who had Ive's work on the Columbus project in what eventually became the 5 colored iMac's. After Amelio was dumped, Jobs was probably the one who mandated losing the legacy stuff like the floppy. And to be fair, I don't think the iMac would have done as well if Amelio had tried to market it; he was a good operations guy but not a salesman like Jobs. Nor would he have had the vision and marketing skills to lead Apple to what it is today. Yet, he does deserve credit for taking the steps needed at the start of his tenure as CEO to put Apple back on the road to profitability even though he wasn't around long enough to see those results in 1998.
In the end, the one who reaped all the credit for turning Apple around was Jobs and given that Jobs never thought highly of Amelio in the first place, was never going to acknowledge this fact to the general public. Jobs has a history of treating others very poorly and as a human being, my respect for him isn't very high compared to the three individuals running Acquicor. Note that is separate from his ability to run a business successfully but there is more to life than abusing and taking advantage of others to claw your way to the top of the business ladder.