Micrel's Ray Zinn ends run as Silicon Valley's longest-serving CEO - San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE — Ray Zinn finished his last day as Silicon Valley's longest-serving CEO of a public company on Friday, shutting his briefcase one last time on nearly four decades of valley booms and busts. It was a goodbye to Micrel, the semiconductor company he started in 1978, during the golden years for the silicon chip from which the valley derived its name. It was also a goodbye to an industry he expects may all but disappear from the region that birthed it. The semiconductor industry has been beaten and battered by consolidation, price-cutting and competition from Asia, but Zinn steered Micrel... In May, fellow chipmaker Microchip bought Micrel, one of the valley's oldest semiconductor firms, for $839 million, making Zinn's firm just the latest victim of the massive contraction that has rocked the industry. Not necessarily what I wanted to happen, but that's what did happen. He guided the company through five U. S. recessions and buffered the blow of the dot-com bust, which cut Micrel's revenue by about 37 percent. He closed down one of Micrel's two fabrication plants, a $29 million loss, and laid off about 10 percent of the workforce in 2002. "I didn't want to lose money because I had this record going of never losing money," Zinn said. But Micrel emerged that year with a mere $50,000 loss on its books, a relative success in an environment where tech companies were shuttering up and down Silicon Valley. Source: www.mercurynews.com
