Texas Instruments Inc.: CEO History

Texas Instruments manufactures chips that nobody sees in devices nobody glamorizes — industrial equipment, automotive systems, factory automation, medical monitors — and has built a $155 billion company doing it. The $15.6 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue sounds modest against semiconductor peers, but TI earns that revenue with only 34,000 employees, a ratio that reflects the economics of a company that has spent two decades eliminating every activity that does not compound its manufacturing cost advantage. The decision to exit the smartphone chip business in 2013 looked risky. Qualcomm and MediaTek were growing fast. The application processor market was enormous. TI's management looked at the margin structure, the customer concentration risk, and the capital requirements of competing at leading-edge process nodes, and walked away. The freed capital went into analog and embedded processing — slower-growth, longer-cycle markets with pricing stability that smartphone chips never offered. The 300-millimeter wafer strategy is TI's most important structural position. Analog chips do not require the most advanced process nodes — they work fine on mature manufacturing lines. TI has been systematically building 300-millimeter capacity for those mature-node analog chips, capturing a roughly 40% per-unit cost advantage over competitors still manufacturing on 200-millimeter lines. The 2021 acquisition of Micron's Lehi, Utah facility for $900 million added 300-millimeter capacity at a price that would be impossible to replicate today given construction cost inflation. The Burr-Brown acquisition in 2000 and the National Semiconductor acquisition in 2011 added precision analog product lines that serve industrial and medical customers — markets where TI now commands significant share and faces limited competitive pressure from the lower-cost Chinese analog producers whose capabilities remain concentrated in less demanding specifications.