Steering a company into a near-suicidal megamerger has to be one of the more creative ideas to get rid of a chief executive that a chairman has ever had. But that seems to be the upshot of the story reported by the Financial Times Deutschland earlier today. The story has no named sources. But, at the same time, Reinhard Ploss, head of operations at Infineon Technologies, had to recruit vice president Eric Mayer to stand in for him at the IET/GSA Semiconductor Forum today while Ploss apparently dealt with things back at base.
According to the story, Infineon chairman Max Dietrich Kley thinks buying NXP Semiconductor, currently owned by private-equity KKR, is a good idea. Chief executive Wolfgang Ziebart disagrees strongly. There is no real way to reconcile these differences so one of them will have to go, and it will probably be Ziebart. As the story in FTD sums up:
Despite Ziebart's competence, "in a shark-tank like Infineon he is out of place," said a senior manager.
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