Anyone Want To Buy GEC-Plessey Semiconductors?

"I read about it in the newspapers - nobody has started a discussion with us," Dr Heinrich von Pierer president and CEO of Siemens told EW last week, "but we have a good strong position in the UK - we have North Tyneside (a UK wafer fab) and we can expand that operation."

"We were interested in 1990 when GPS was headed up by a real good guy - Doug Dunn a real professional - but now things have moved on," Karl Baumann, Siemens' financial boss told EW, "now we have North Tyneside we have White Oak (a joint venture fab in the USA) and we have the Mosel-Vitelic joint venture (a Taiwan fab) so GPS is no longer a good fit."

Korea's Samsung told EW it was not interested in buying GPS while Hyundai's 1995 acquisition of Symbios Logic of the US (formerly NCR Microelectronics) is seen as its route to acquiring a logic capability. However LG Semicon which is building a memory fab in South Wales is believed to be considering buying GPS because of the advanced Roborough wafer fab which is optimised for logic products which are a gap in LG's portfolio.

The downside of the deal for potential purchasers is the elderly nature of some of GPS' other fabs in Oldham and Lincoln. If these could be found a buyer a sale of the rest of GPS could be more easily effected. However Zetex the Oldham-based discrete semiconductor manufacturer said: "Nobody's called us and we haven't called them."

"I have not seen any public statement '' Pasquale Pistorio president and CEO of SGS-Thomson told EW last week. "Are we interested in GPS? I have no comment to make." In 1989 SGS-Thomson took over another UK semiconductor company - Inmos - from Thorn.