Comment by bgnn
4 months ago
A bit of history:
Nexperia was formed because back in 2017 (if I remember correctly) Qualcomm wanted to buy NXP. So NXP wanted to look more attractive to Qualcomm shareholders and sold its more low-tech business unit to Chinese investors. That acquisition didn't go through because of the tensions between US and China during the first Trump admin.
NXP has been trimming fat since its formation from Philips Semiconductors and American or Chinese companies are buying whatever business unit they can grab. They pretty much buy it for the IP and the customers. Once they get the IP they usually fore the whole team and shut dient operations in NL.
Nexperia wasn't doing this though. They had no interesting technology to steal oe transfer to China to begin with.
> NXP has been trimming fat since its formation from Philips Semiconductors
Honestly it appears to me that Philips themselves have just been losing talent/marketshare/I'm not even sure what, causing their gradual decline. The Philips I grew up with was an electronics powerhouse. Today apart, from their healthcare department (and maybe their slightly overpriced lighting department via Signifify), they don't seem to be very "active", and that makes me sad.
This has been going on for decades.
I once did a brief consulting stint at what was then considered one of the most innovative, startuppy departments of Philips Healthcare, and it was by far the slowest-moving, least productive software team I've ever seen.
They had just "ended a sprint" when I came in, and 3 months later they still hadn't started another. People were just fooling around. There was a rule that talking about work during lunch was a no-no (so we talked about hockey and babies, the only subjects that 2+ people had in common). Testers were a separate team, and they refused to test things, no matter how small, without being allocated months of dedicated time to first make a detailed 50-page docx "test scenario". The mini product I was assigned to work on took 3 months to complete but the 5-page spec had been argued over for the past 18 months and signed off by, in total, 8 managers and 6 directors. I was the only person shipping anything of actual business value during that period (not because I'm so great, just because I was the only one asked to do anything of business value).
This is now a decade and a half ago. With the series of number-crunching Excel MBAs leading Philips since then I quite doubt that this will have changed for the better.
"You can't move a waste paper basket a metre without filling in three forms and getting approval of four managers" was already the running joke about Philips in the 90s.
In part this is a large organisation thing that happens everywhere. See 2001 Google vs. current Google for example. I don't know why Philips ended up being so bad in particular.
The break-up of Philips is not a bad thing. Many viable components have been spun off in various ways and the business is essentially fine, just not under the Philips name and management.
Philips 'unalived' any chances for massive future revenues when they killed off Natlab (in spirit, not just in name). Philips Natlab was the Bell Labs of the Netherlands, even Europe perhaps.
In 1989 Philips introduced a new financing structure that required Natlab to secure two-thirds of its budget through contracts with Philips' product divisions. This marked a major change from its prior model, where funding came directly from the corporate board.
Anything that wasn't "commercially viable" according to the penny-polishers with MBAs was abandoned. The dumbest move ever. Fundamental research can't be outsourced, and never has immediate commercial value.
This. They gave the keys to the management of the business units and layers of managerial hierarchy under.
I did my PhD project in collaboration with NXP research which used to be the semiconductor division of Natlab. At every project meeting there were at least 2 mid level managers from 3 business units funding the projects+ 2 mid level managers from the research department + 1 engineer overseeing the technical work. So, it was 8-9 managers + 1 engineer + 1 PhD student. They were all chill and didn't roadblock anything for me, apart from all business units deciding to do their own development on the same topic because they didn't trust anyone else. So I was mostly left to myself because the money was already given but they lost interest. They were still attending the meetings as a break from the other meetings I thought.