日本半导体业者瑞萨电子(Renesas Electronics)近日发布最新一季(2014年4~6月)财报，当季业绩表现优于该公司预测，半导体销售额较上一季成长4.9%，来到2,012 亿日圆(19.7亿美元)，营业收入(operating income)则较上一季的100亿日圆成长至270亿日圆。
瑞萨这一季芯片销售额与上一季、去年同期相较都呈现成长，主要动力来自汽车芯片以及通用产品,
例如，高性能、低功耗的运算放大器产品；不过这样的成长表现并不能证明瑞萨已经完全复苏，瑞萨首席执行官作田久男(Hisao Sakuta)在一场记者会上形容该公司仍是“住院观察中的病人”。
瑞萨目前的管理团队将注意力集中在公司毛利，简单来说，如果没有足够的毛利支撑，一家公司就无法支付营运等未来发展所需支出；作田表示，瑞萨目前最紧急的任务是“提升毛利率，为生存而奋斗”。他在记者会上接受提问时，还反问了一个问题：“如果你是客户，你会跟一家有可能破产的公司做生意吗？”
最近这几季，瑞萨的毛利一直稳定成长，主要原因包括日币贬值、各项组织改造策略奏效(包括关闭晶圆厂、裁员)，以及将资源集中在某些产品线。瑞萨估计在本会计年度的下半年，毛利率可提升到38.3%；作田指出：“我们的目标是在三年内将毛利率进一步提升至45%。”
瑞萨季度财报
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那些走向EOL的产品
先前担任奥姆龙(Omron)总裁暨董事长的作田，在记者会上还透露了一些瑞萨正在与客户协商部分产品停产问题的“残酷细节”──他表示，除了继续进行组织改造，瑞萨亟需退出利润不佳的产品线，就算那些产品可能仍是客户有关键需求的芯片。
因为已经关闭了旗下几座晶圆厂，瑞萨无法再生产某些特定芯片产品；此外该公司也需要停止生产某些客户需求已经大量萎缩的产品。尽管停产特定零组件是让瑞萨提升毛利的最关键步骤，这也是对客户来说最具争议性(也是最不受欢迎)的策略。
瑞萨首席执行官作田久男 |
瑞萨大部分的车用芯片营收，是来自于该公司与包括丰田(Toyota)等日本汽车大厂在内的长期关系，因为汽车厂商往往需要长期供应的、具备一定质量的产 品；因此瑞萨与客户之间的停产协商不但不讨喜，也不是简单任务。不过作田表示，与产业界人士的猜测相反，瑞萨与汽车厂商之间的协商已经取得进展。
“当然，我们也曾重复被(一些特定汽车厂商)告知，“不要再来找我们了”；”作田指出：“但到最后，我们的客户还是会需要我们，我们也需要他们。我们一直恳求他们回到桌边来谈，也取得了进展。”他表示，事实上瑞萨在非汽车相关领域遇到更多的困难。
停产部分产品的冲击已经显现在瑞萨的财报数字上；瑞萨首席财务官柴田英利(Hidetoshi Shibata)表示，因为需要提前库存准备停产的组件，该公司在最近一季已经看到人为收入提升(artificial income boost)：“为了确保持续的正面结果，我们需要进一步的改造。”
虽然与客户之间的停产协商会很艰难，双方都需要保持一定程度的相互尊重与信任。作田解释，对于芯片供货商能维持多长时间的特定必须组件供应，以及客户在某一段特定时期的实际芯片需求量是多少，双方要取得共识。
作田表示，客户会是根据未来产品销售量预测来衡量，供货商则是要留意其需求：“如果他们说需要100颗芯片，我们会需要生产比那更多的芯片，因为客户不能缺料；但如果有太多组件剩余未使用，谁要买单？我们能跟客户分摊这样的风险吗？”
本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载
第2页：出售子公司，过度依赖车用芯片
第3页：仍在奋力挣扎求生，管理层间派系斗争严重
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出售子公司Renesas SP Drivers
瑞萨在今年也决定出售旗下子公司瑞力(Renesas SP Drivers)，后者是一家LCD驱动器/控制器芯片无晶圆厂设计公司，在市场上并不是热门公司；但因为瑞力的产品进驻了苹果(Apple) iPhone、为瑞萨整体营收贡献不少，产业分析师也质疑作田出售子公司的决定是否明智──事实上，瑞力是全球最大的中小尺寸LCD面板驱动芯片供货商， 市占率高达30%。
对于放弃该项业务，作田表示：“确实，瑞力是有获利能力的，但我的观点是LCD驱动芯片在未来还有许多需要做的；”而瑞萨已决定专注于汽车与工业电子，恐怕无暇兼顾非核心业务的瑞萨：“以长期来看，我们恐怕无法维持瑞力目前的市占率水平。”
作田认为，能在瑞力发展最高峰的时候卖掉它是最好的，而美商Synaptics已决定以总价485亿日圆(4.75亿美元)买下其所有股份。其他瑞萨打算结 束或是退出的业务包括光驱驱动器、PC用SoC与低电压功率MOSFET、LTE调制解调器芯片、手机用安全微控制器(MCU)、大尺寸显示器驱动IC，以 及家用多媒体SoC、游戏机SoC等等。
车用芯片业务
在全球车用芯片市场，拥有38%市占率的瑞萨无疑是领导供货商；该公司在工业用MCU市场上的排名也是数一数二。作田表示，根据市场研究机构Gartner的统计数据，“瑞萨的MCU销售量在全球供货商排行榜上，是最接近之竞争对手(Freescale)的一倍以上。”
瑞萨是全球汽车与工业领域的第一大MCU供货商
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作田指出，维持瑞萨在车用MCU市场的领导地位，是“最急迫的任务”。瑞萨的车用芯片业务中，有七成营收来自于汽车控制芯片──包括动力传动、汽车底盘/安 全性，以及车身控制；其余则是应用于汽车信息/驾驶辅助等装置。至于新崛起的先进驾驶辅助系统(ADAS)市场，瑞萨到目前为止则很少谈论相关产品或是市占率。
针对瑞萨的车用市场策略，作田表示瑞萨期望能藉由确保车用芯片的“功能性安全(functional safety)”来增加产品价值，并将“安全性”整合到其汽车解决方案。举例来说，瑞萨在提供金融卡安全性功能方面有长期经验，这在汽车解决方案将会很有帮助。
在 被问到瑞萨将如何在汽车仪表板以及车用资通讯娱乐系统领域与众多新进者──包括Nvidia、高通(Qualcomm)与英特尔──竞争时，作田表示：“我们会需要在一个更广大的产业生态系统中建立伙伴关系。”并指出，单一家芯片能在一个广大的市场上创造明显差异化的时代已经不复存在。
本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载
第3页：仍在奋力挣扎求生，管理层间派系斗争严重
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仍在奋力挣扎求生
在记者会上，作田的发言一直未偏离该公司提升毛利的承诺、以及将如何达成其目标的计划；他完全没有提到现今在芯片供货商发表财报时，最常提到的物联网(IoT)市场。对此作田表示：“我跳过这个题目，并不是因为它对我们不重要，而是我认为它已经是既定的。”
作田认为，在正起飞的物联网市场，安全性是一个悬而未决的问题：“瑞萨希望能在安全性与RF方面对物联网市场有所贡献。”他指出：“我常被要求对员工谈一些大方向、能协助他们梦想伟大的题目；谈梦想很容易，但如果我们不执行计划，就没有梦想可言。”
记者会结束之后，笔者恰好与作田搭同一部电梯；我问他自一年前加入瑞萨以来有哪些让他感到惊讶的大事，他用了一句日文“想定外(soteigai)”，也就 是超出预料之外(这个词在日本2011年311大地震与海啸期间成为热门的形容词)；他表示：“很多事情都出乎意料之外。”
日本产业界广泛流传，瑞萨衰弱不振的关键因素之一，是因为各个业务单位的管理阶层架构太过繁复，因为该公司是由日立(Hitachi)、三菱 (Mitsubishi)与NEC的半导体部门合并而成；作田是第一个在公开场合指责这种非必要、多余之高昂固定成本的瑞萨CEO：“有这些不断增加的固 定成本，瑞萨就无法产生任何新的力量。”
我问作田，三家母公司管理阶层之间的派系斗争是否让他感到意外，他说：“没有，这是个简单的问题。”他说，让他意外的事情是，要让瑞萨完全复苏的这个工作：“仍然让人烦恼而且非常痛苦。”瑞萨目前针对受组织重整影响的员工提供优退计划， 没有公布人数无上限或目标，该公司将为9月份提出申请的员工设定退休日期。
瑞萨的2016年财务目标
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本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载
编译：Judith Cheng
参考英文原文：To Stay Alive, Renesas Negotiates End-of-Life Deals，by Junko Yoshida
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To Stay Alive, Renesas Negotiates End-of-Life Deals
Junko Yoshida
TOKYO — Renesas Electronics, beating its own estimates, reported Wednesday, Aug. 6, that its semiconductor sales in the April-June quarter grew to 201.2 billion yen (US$1.97 billion), up 4.9 percent from the previous quarter. Operating income was 27.0 billion yen, an increase of 10 billion yen over the last quarter.
Driven by increases in automotive sales and general-purpose products, the company’s first-quarter chip sales grew both quarter-by-quarter and year-on-year.
This uptick, however, is hardly a proof of Renesas’s full recovery, according to CEO Hisao Sakuta. During a press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, Sakuta described Renesas as “a patient still in the hospital.”
Today, the new management team at Renesas is focused on gross margin. Simply put, without an adequate gross margin, a company can’t pay its operating and other expenses and build for the future. Sakuta said that the most urgent task for Renesas, “still fighting for survival... [is] to improve our gross profit rate.”
Sakuta, during Q&A, asked a rhetorical question: “If you’re a customer, would you do business with a company who might go bankrupt?”
Renesas’s gross margin has been steadily improving in recent quarters -- helped by foreign currency exchange rates, a host of structuring reforms (closing a number of its own fabs and laying off employees), and selective focus on the company’s product mix. Noting that the company’s estimated gross profit rate is 38.3 percent during the second half of the current fiscal year, Sakuta said, “Our goal is to improve it to 45 percent in three years.”
Renesas Quarterly Financial Results
Click here for larger image.
(Source: Renesas Electronics)
End-of-life products
Sakuta, former Omron president and chairman, bluntly offered a few of the “gory details” of the end-of-life (EOL) product negotiations Renesas is engaged in with its customers.
Beyond its commitment to further “structural reforms,” Renesas badly needs to unload unprofitable products, even though some of those chips are in critical demand by customers, according to the Renesas CEO. Renesas simply won’t be able to make certain chips due to the closing of its own fabs. In some cases, Renesas needs to end the product because the company sees that customer applications are shrinking.
While ending the production of certain parts and components is surely the most critical step in restoring the company’s gross margin, it’s the most controversial (and grossly unpopular) among customers.
Much of Renesas’s automotive chip revenue is generated by the company’s long-standing relationships with Japan’s leading carmakers, including Toyota. Since automotive companies tend to need certain qualified products on a long-term basis, these EOL discussions are neither pleasant nor easy. Sakuta, however, said, contrary to some industry speculations, Renesas is making progress negotiating with carmakers.
Hisao Sakuta, CEO
Renesas Electronics
(Source: EE Times/Junko Yoshida)
“Of course, we have been repeatedly told [by certain automotive companies], ‘Never ever come and visit us again,’ ” said Sakuta. “But in the end, our customers will need us, and we will need them. We’ve been pleading for them to come back to the table, and we are succeeding to an extent.” In fact, Renesas now faces more difficulties in areas unrelated to automotive, according to Sakuta.
The impact of EOL decisions on some products is already showing in the company’s financial results. Because Renesas needs to stockpile EOL products in advance, the company has seen an artificial income boost in the latest quarter, said Renesas CFO Hidetoshi Shibata: “To ensure constant positive results, we need to do further reforms.”
Although EOL discussions with customers can be tough, both parties need to preserve a level of mutual respect and trust. Sakuta explained that a chip supplier and customer need to agree on how long the chip vendor can keep supplying certain needed parts, and how many chips the customer actually needs over a certain period of time. The customer is relying on its own forecast of how many products it will actually sell in the future, and the supplier is heeding its needs, Sakuta explained. “If they say they need 100 chips, we’d have to make a lot more than 100 chips, because they can’t be short of parts. But if any parts are left unused, who pays for them? Do we share the risk with our customer?”
Sale of Renesas SP Drivers
Renesas’s decision this year to unload its stake in Renesas SP Drivers, a fabless supplier of drivers and controllers for liquid crystal displays, wasn’t exactly popular. Industry analysts questioned Sakuta’s wisdom in this sale, at a time when Renesas SP Drivers’ products are designed into Apple’s iPhones, making a healthy contribution to Renesas’s revenue.
In fact, Renesas SP Drivers is the world's largest maker of small and midsized LCD drivers, holding a 30 percent share of the market.
Speaking about ending this business, Sakuta said, “Surely, Renesas SP Drivers has been profitable. But my view is that a lot more needs to be done in the LCD drivers of the future.” Citing Renesas’s commitment to concentrate on automotive and industrial electronics, he added, “I predict Renesas SP Drivers’ business will eventually become a little remote island, very little to do with our core businesses. We wouldn’t be able to maintain the current share, over the long term.”
Sakuta thought it best, he said, to sell the company at its height. Synaptics will purchase all shares of Renesas SP Drivers in October, including those not held by Renesas, for 48.5 billion yen ($475 million).
Other businesses and products Renesas is planning to end or withdraw from include optical disk drives, SoC and low-voltage power MOSFET for PCs, LTE modem ICs, secure MCU for mobile handsets, large display driver ICs and home multimedia SoC, and game console SoC business.
Automotive business
Renesas remains the undisputed world leader in the automotive MCU business, with 38 percent market share. Similarly, the company is tops in the industrial MCU market. Sakuta went out of his way to point out that Renesas holds “more than double the market share of Renesas's closest competitor” (Freescale) in worldwide MCU sales rankings last year, according to Gartner’s numbers.
Renesas is the No. 1 MCU supplier in both the automotive and industrial product categories.
(Source: Gartner)
Maintaining its lead in automotive MCU is Renesas’s “most pressing agenda,” said Sakuta.
Of Renesas’s automotive business, 70 percent of the company’s revenue is generated by chips used in automotive controls -- including those used in powertrain, chassis/safety, and body. The rest comes from chips used in automotive information/driver assistance. While the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) market is still emerging, Renesas, thus far, has spoken very little of its products in the offing or its market share.
Asked about the company’s automotive strategy, Sakuta said Renesas hopes to add value by ensuring the “functional safety” of its automotive chips, and integrating “security” into its automotive solutions. Renesas’s long-running experience in providing security functions to bank cards, for example, should be useful in the automotive solutions, he believes.
Asked how Renesas plans to compete in automotive dash and in-vehicle infotainment systems, where a host of newcomers -- including Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Intel -- are moving in, Sakuta said, “We’ll need partnerships in a larger ecosystem.” The days are long past when a single chip company can make a huge difference in a very large market, he added.
Still painful
During the press conference, Sakuta never deviated from the company’s commitment to improvement of its gross margin and how the company plans to achieve it. Sakuta didn’t mention even once the Internet of Things -- a familiar current theme among chip vendors announcing their earning results. Asked why, Sakuta said, “I skipped the topic, not because it’s unimportant to us, but I see it already as a given.” For the IoT market to take off, security remains an unsettled issue, said Sakuta. “Renesas hopes to contribute to IoT, in terms of security and RF.”
“I’m often asked to speak to our employees about something big, something that helps them hold big dreams. It’s easy to talk about dreams. But if we don’t execute our plans, we have no dreams to talk about.”
After the press conference, this reporter shared an elevator ride with Sakuta. Asked about big surprises since he joined Renesas a year ago, he used the word “soteigai,” meaning unforeseeable, (the word got popular in Japan when many authorities used the term to describe what happened at the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in 2011). Sakuta said, “There have been just so many things that were ‘soteigai.’ ”
It’s been broadly reported in Japan that the key issue for an ailing Renesas was a double or triple management structure created in each business unit, as a result of the merger of chip divisions of Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC. During the press conference, Sakuta was the first Renesas CEO to blame this redundancy for the company’s unnecessarily high fixed costs. “With all that increased fixed cost, Renesas didn’t create any new energy or strength.”
When asked if the factional struggle among managers from three different parent companies surprised him, Sakuta said, “No. That was an easy problem.” Surprising to him was that the job of achieving a full recovery at Renesas “is still agonizing and still very painful.”
Over the past two years, Renesas dramatically reduced its head count from 42,800 to 27,200. In early July, Renesas announced yet another reorganization plan by “redefining the design and development units at Renesas and those at the group’s three affiliate companies in Japan.”
Renesas is offering an early retirement program for employees and affiliate companies affected by these changes. While no upper limit or target has been stated, the company is setting the retirement date for those who apply at September 2014.
Renesas Targeted Financial Model
Net sales in billions of yen.
Click here for larger image.
责编：Quentin
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