News

Fairchild Sets Sights on Europe and Japan

October 05, 2004 by Jeff Shepard

Kirk Pond, CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor International (South Portland, ME) announced that the company is searching for companies to acquire in Japan and Europe in pursuit of Fairchild's focus on power devices. Power devices now represent 75% of the company's sales revenues. The company's share in the European power market is 3.5%, and 7% in Japan.

"Europe is very important. It is the largest power market and our share is modest. It is not something we are happy about," said Pond. "We've been trying for years to make an acquisition in Europe. Because of the industrial and automation activities, and because it is where the reference designs for portable electronics get done, we have to get into the reference designs and win the design-ins from the people manufacturing product in Europe."

Pond is hoping to find a European company that will sell its power division to him. "Infineon is thinking about what its strategy is," said Pond, "maybe there's an opportunity for us. we are not having discussions with anyone in Europe, but we have business relationships with European firms and have some productive joint projects."

Pond is also contemplating Japanese acquisition prospects. "Our share in Japan is small relative to our share elsewhere. Our preferred way to get our market share up in Japan is to buy a Japanese vendor," said Pond. "I'm not sure that could happen, though there are a lot of Japanese companies that have power operations."