Infineon chief executive Ziebart resigns (Roundup)

Business News

May 26, 2008, 16:56 GMT

Munich - The chief executive of troubled German semiconductor manufacturer Infineon, Wolfgang Ziebart, resigned Monday after vainly trying to stop downsizing at the global company. He is to be replaced by Peter Bauer effective June 1, the company said Monday in Munich. It said the supervisory board had passed a unanimous vote of confidence in board chairman Max Dietrich Kley and had adopted a budget-trimming programme, code-named IFX 10-Plus, to reduce manufacturing and management costs. News reports say Kley and Ziebart have squared off in a power struggle in recent weeks, with Kley saying Ziebart must go. Kley reportedly favours a merger or ties with a Dutch semiconductor company, NXP, to save the business. The statement said Ziebart, who took over four years ago, was leaving because of 'differences over the future strategic direction' at Infineon, which also operates out of California, Singapore and Japan. A major world supplier of chips, Infineon started out as a division of the huge electronics group Siemens. Infineon tried to shake off its least profitable business, mass-market chips, by spinning off the factories under a new name, Qimonda. In the first quarter of this year, Infineon's losses mounted to a whopping 1.37 billion euros (2.14 billion dollars). In the year ending September 2007, the group including Qimonda had global sales of 7.7 billion euros and 43,000 employees. The new chief executive was formerly in charge of a division supplying specialized chips for cars and machines. Infineon is the 27th-biggest company by market capitalization on the DAX index of major German enterprises, according to a 2007 ranking.

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