ST Makes it Official: Chery to Succeed Bozotti

　　STMicroelectronics made official what had been widely presumed: that Jean-Marc Chery, currently the company's chief operating officer, will take the reins from CEO Carlo Bozotti when Bozotti retires later this year.

　　ST (Geneva) reported fourth quarter and year-end results that bested analysts' expectations, driven by strength in the automotive sector and growth across the board. ST's 2017 sales increased by 20 percent overall, with automotive sales growing by 9 percent.

　　ST said Chery, who last April was elevated to the position of deputy CEO, will assume the role of president and CEO and become the sole member of the company's managing board immediately following its annual shareholder meeting expected in April or May. Chery has been with ST since its formation in 1987.

　　Bozotti's retirement has been anticipated in recent years. He has been CEO of ST since 2005 and is widely credited with turning the company around after years of lackluster financial performance.

　　In a conference call with analysts to discuss ST's quarterly and fiscal year financial results, Bozotti largely focused on the automotive sector and the Internet of Things, saying areas like imaging will play an important part in automotive over the next 10 years. "We want to be there," he said.

　　Other key areas that will be a focus of ST in the near future will be microcontrollers for industrial, wireless connectivity, security and intelligence in the microcontroller, enabling AI at the edge, he said.

　　"We are executing on a growth strategy centered on the most promising application domains: smart driving, internet of things, including industrial, and the non-digital part of smartphones," Bozotti said. "This enables us to cover 40 percent of the total semiconductor market.  Importantly, our unique product portfolio offers all of the essential blocks to serve the IoT and smart driving applications."

　　ST announced 2017 net revenues of $8.35 billion, up 19.7 percent over 2016, with fiscal fourth quarter net revenue of $2.47 billion, up 15.5 percent sequentially.

　　Revenue from ST's top 10 customers – Apple, Bosch, Cisco, Conti, HP, Huawei, Nintendo, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital – was up 37 percent in 2017.  Growth by product group was highest from the analog, MEMS and sensors group, where revenues were up 41.4 percent, as a result of triple-digit growth in imaging and strong growth in both analog and MEMS. The microcontroller and digital IC group revenues increased 15.8 percent and the automotive and discrete group revenues increased 8.8 percent.

　　Bozotti said the average ST content in a car has continued to increase, with the company now providing up to 1,000 semiconductor components in a premium car like the Audi A8.

　　"In the area of safer driving we made good progress in product development and production ramp up, and we achieved substantial growth with ADAS-related components," he said.

　　In other product areas, Bozotti added, “We also continued to see strong growth and market traction with our 32-bit microcontroller families for automotive, particularly in body and gateway applications at several car makers.”

　　On the technology development front, Chery said ST would focus in 2018 on developing differentiated flavors of its BCD [bipolar, CMOS and power DMOS] technology family, which allows the company to address higher power and voltage applications as well as galvanic isolation, and on further developing its next generation of imaging technologies. He said the company would launch a new single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) in 40nm technology enabling "a step change" in performance for time-of-flight applications.

　　Chery said ST's CMOS technology roadmap is evolving along three axes of development. "First, we are enriching our 28nm FD-SOI platform with additional features to address RF and space applications," he said.

　　"Second, we recently announced our adoption of 22FDX foundry technology as the next node in our FD-SOI roadmap targeting specific high performance and low power products. And, third, we are working with 16 and 7nm FinFET platforms from foundry partners where we are designing products for high density digital applications including SoCs for autonomous driving.