CEO T.J. Rodgers is the head of the new company formed after the $4 billion all-stock 50 per cent-split Cypress-Spansion merger. Under the global name Cypress, the company will keep Spansion's world leadership in NOR Flash memory and retain Cypress' huge SRAM memory market.

When asked about possible product line consolidations (both companies offer memory and ARM-based MCUs for the automotive market), Rodgers emphasised the complementarity of the two companies.

"Of course, there may be some overhead and duplication of sales forces, but on the R&D front, all our programmes will continue unaffected on both sides, without any cuts," Rodgers told press. Within three years, the merger is expected to achieve more than $135 million in cost synergies on an annualised basis.

"We'll be able to exchange more IP, and that will certainly open up new ventures, but there is virtually zero duplication between our product portfolios," he said. "One of the benefits of this merger is precisely that Cypress and Spansion's lines of MCUs are almost complementary. There is no negative revenue synergy."

Even if both companies were already present individually in the automotive market, Rodgers explained that, though Cypress tends to address embedded system solutions in the cockpit, with touchscreen interfaces, Spansion's products find their way into car engine management.

As for the memory markets that the two companies served (Spansion will retain its own name in the merger), Rodgers expects cross-channel selling to expand the whole company's memory business.

Remaining on board as one of the four Spansion directors, John Kispert (formerly CEO at Spansion) said the resulting company has all the essential building blocks to address factory automation and next-generation connected cars and to fuel IoT growth.

"When we started our conversation, Rodgers and I, we realised that, by putting our companies together, we would see a wonderful roadmap in the growth of IoT," Kispert said, although a joint growth plan for the post-merger company has not been formalised yet.

Rodgers said, "If we lay out our combined portfolio, we now truly have a one-stop shop for our customers, so we become a more strategic supplier. We eliminate multiple sources, and this makes it easier for them, too. As one company, we have doubled our number of customers."

By: DocMemory
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