Since promoting Bob Rivet to the position of Chief
Operations and Administrative Officer,
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) has been
running without a
dedicated CFOfor the last year or so. Now the permanent
CFO has been named, so AMD can move on with a fully
functional management team. That's great -- but I'm feeling a
little queasy about the final choice.
Rivet had been pulling double duty ever since AMD began
its search for a CFO. Rivet came to AMD in 2000 from the
semiconductor division of
Motorola (NYSE: MOT) shortly after the
company brought on Hector Ruiz, who would later become the
CEO. Now
Ruiz is out, Rivet is fully installed in a new role, and
the management team looks very different from the one that
took AMD through some of its
highest highsand
most miserable lows.
Tom Seifert, the new man for the job, is a former
executive at German chip designer
Infineon AG and then memory chip maker
Qimonda . I don't have anything against
Seifert personally, and he certainly has a lot of experience
in the semiconductor industry. AMD wouldn't spend a year
looking for an executive only to settle for anybody less than
solidly qualified for the job. But mention Qimonda and I
can't help but be reminded of that company's
recent bankruptcy. As
an AMD investor, that connection does not make me
comfortable. Still, Qimonda's demise was the result of a
brutal price warbetween memory titans like
Samsung ,
SanDisk (Nasdaq: SNDK), and
Micron (NYSE: MU), and hardly Seifert's
fault. We can give the guy a break.
AMD's entire business model
looks radically differentthan it has in recent years,
during which
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) has been running circles
around it, but we're seeing the first stages of a very
different AMD now. Let's hope this new
management team can successfully guide the company through a
difficult phase in which it sheds assets and re-focuses on
the engineering of its products.
Did AMD upgrade or downgrade its management team today?
Does Seifert's experience trump his
association with Qimonda's descent into bankruptcy? I'm dying
to know what you think, and the comments box below is waiting
for you.
This article was originally published as
Did AMD Pick the Right CFO?on
Fool.com
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