What is the ProMOS endgame?
“Endgame” is such a nasty word. Of course it’s a pity that we break up, but it happens in business. Mosel Vitelic changes its vision of the business — they’re no longer a long-term committed DRAM [dynamic random-access memory chips] partner. We had to decide on the next level [investment], and we want to do that with a partner with the same commitment. It’s clear our strategies don’t fit anymore. Q: What went wrong? A: ProMOS was one of our fabs [or chip-fabrication plants]. It was part of Infineon’s fab management. A fab should drive productivity, making [production] cheaper and more efficient. That’s what a fab does. But for Mosel, this was also a financial investment. We never cared about ProMOS’s market cap. It’s a fab. We don’t care. But they started to say that ProMOS had its own image, and they were tempted to make ProMOS more than a fab. Q: What’s bad about that? A: The [risk is that] complexity goes up, and the productivity goes down. It [can] defocus [the fab’s] activity. Th
