Last British-Owned Fab Sold

Staff -- Semiconductor International, 4/1/1998

GEC Plessey Semiconductors (GPS, Swindon, England) has been sold to Mitel, a Canadian telecommunications group, for $225 million. This sale of the sixth largest European semiconductor company ends a more than 30-year struggle to develop a significant British-owned semiconductor industry under successive governments. Global competition led to various mergers among GEC, Plessey and  Ferranti that finally brought the formation of GPS, whose name will now disappear.

GPS has ~2700 employees and produces chips mainly for the communications, personal computer, media and defense industries. In mixed-signal ASICs it is one of the top 10 manufacturers in the world. It made a pre-tax profit of $11.8 million on sales of $300 million in the year ending April 1997. The acquisition will expand Mitel's existing semiconductor operations, giving it a 0.35 µm (350 nm) fab processing 200 mm wafers at Roborough. Mitel has previously been limited to 0.8 µm (80 nm) production, mainly for devices for telecommunications. Last year Mitel acquired ABB Hafo Semiconductors.

The GPS managing director said the sale was sensible, as if GPS had remained a separate company, it would not have had the critical mass to succeed. The former Ferranti bipolar business at Oldham, England, has been excluded from the sale, so this Zetex facility is now all that remains of the British-owned industry.