When the Cathedral’s bells finally fall silent, just move on

NXP’s ICN8 chip plant in Nijmegen will likely close by the mid-to-late 2030s. At the firm’s Investor Day, held in November last year, chief of operations Andy Micallef unveiled a new manufacturing strategy, in which internal 200mm manufacturing will be scaled down and consolidated into 300mm factories in Germany and Singapore. “It will take about ten years to make this migration,” he added.

Assuming the clock starts ticking when the new facilities start shipping wafers, ICN8 will be shut down by 2037 at the latest. Management would prefer it to be sooner, however. “We would rather go earlier out of the 200-millimeter facilities than later because for us, it’s just a significant part of the commitment that we gave at our last Investor Day, to increase gross margins into a bracket of 57-63 percent and eventually higher later on,” then-CEO Kurt Sievers said at the JP Morgan Annual Global Technology, Media and Communications conference. An NXP spokesperson told Bits&Chips “no final decisions” have been made.