Abu Dhabi: ATIC, the Advanced Technology Investment Company, a subsidiary of Mubadala, is expecting its semiconductor manufacturing company, Global Foundries, to become a sustainable profitable enterprise by 2015, ATIC’s CEO Ebrahim Ajami said.
“Over the coming two to three years, Global Foundries will be well on the path of profitability,” Ajami told reporter in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. “Again profit in this industry is driven by scale and our ability to generate value for our customers, but since we’ve launched in 2008, we’ve expected and planned for a period of five to six years before we could generate sustained profitability,” he said.
In 2011, Global Foundries’ board of directors appointed Ajit Manocha as CEO of Global Foundries. It was the first of a series of appointments and reassessments made to help the company move forward.
When asked about the Abu Dhabi fab which had been in the plans, but later put on hold, Ajami did not give any specific dates.
“Before you can build any fab you need to invest a significant amount of time and effort and resources into building the right ecosystem in a society and we’ve been doing that for about four years now and we’ll keep doing that,” he said. “The New York facility is now up and running… and now we’ll assess whether that expansion happens in New York or in Abu Dhabi,” he said. Global Foundries opened its New York fab in January of this year.
“Global Foundries went through a series of challenges in the summer of last year which resulted in a significant change of leadership and hence Ajit’s role in this transformation. As part of that reassessment and given we were witnessing some global slowdown we decided to reevaluate our capacity expansion plans, so we went back to the drawing board at the board level,” he said. “Whether that fab comes in 2015, 2017 or 2020, we just cannot but march towards building that ecosystem.”
