Semiconductor History | Plan-les-Ouates, Genève — The Company Built to Belong to Neither Country

An office campus beside a motorway on the edge of Geneva, farmland behind it and the Jura on the horizon.

The company with its corporate headquarters here was assembled so that neither of the two states that built it would own its address.

In June 1987 the semiconductor business of SGS Microelettronica, then held by the Italian state telecoms group STET, was combined with the non-military business of Thomson Semiconducteurs, then held by France's Thomson-CSF.

Both halves were subscale and losing money, and each government could see the same thing: separately, neither would survive an industry the Americans and Japanese were running.

The merged company was called SGS-THOMSON, and it was put under Pasquale Pistorio, who had come from Motorola.

Then the question of where it would live.

The corporate headquarters went to Saint-Genis-Pouilly on the French side of the border, with the European headquarters across it in Geneva, and the holding company incorporated in the Netherlands as a Dutch N.V.

Rome and Paris were not options. A French company with Italian shareholders would have been a French company, and the reverse would have been just as unacceptable, so the registered address went somewhere that was neither.

The corporate headquarters is now on this side of the border, at Plan-les-Ouates outside Geneva. The Dutch incorporation is still there.

The Italian half had its own layered ancestry. SGS Microelettronica came out of a 1972 merger between Società Generale Semiconduttori, founded in 1957 by Olivetti and Telettra, and ATES, which had moved its manufacturing to the industrial zone at Catania in Sicily.

That Sicilian plant is one reason the company still makes chips in places European industrial maps would not predict.

The company floated in December 1994, listing in Paris and New York on the same day.

In May 1998 it took the name STMicroelectronics, after Thomson SA withdrew as an owner and the hyphenated compromise was no longer describing anything.

European industrial policy has a poor record in semiconductors, and most of what it built has closed or been sold. This merger is one of the few that produced a company still operating at global scale nearly forty years later.

Nothing is manufactured at this address. The fabs are at Agrate Brianza in Lombardy, Crolles in the Isère valley, and Catania, which is where anyone looking for the actual industry should go.

What stands here is what the photograph shows: offices, a car park, and a motorway junction, on the ground both parent countries could agree to.

Photo: Alexey M., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the STMicroelectronics campus at Plan-les-Ouates, Geneva, September 2015).