We design, develop and market technology products for the communications and storage
equipment markets. Our products are essential for the transport, processing, switching,
routing and storage of information worldwide. We utilize a combination of design
expertise coupled with system-level knowledge and multiple technologies to offer
integrated circuit, or IC, products, as well as printed circuit board assemblies
or PCBAs, for these markets. We generate revenues in the communications market
primarily through sales of our IC products to communications equipment manufacturers,
such as Alcatel, Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, JDS Uniphase, Juniper,
Lucent, Marconi, NEC, Nortel, Siemens, and Tellabs. In the storage market, we
generate revenues primarily through sales of our host bus adaptor boards, or HBAs,
to original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems,
Network Appliance, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems.
AMCC Strategy
Our objective is to be the leading supplier of technology products for the
transport, switching, routing and storage of information worldwide. Our strategy
for achieving this objective includes:
Focus on the Market Leading Systems within the Communications and Storage Markets
We target key OEM product families that hold significant and/or rapidly growing
market share. We have built substantial competencies focused on the specific
requirements of these key OEM product families in the areas of semiconductor
process technology, mixed-signal, very dense digital design, and substantial
expertise in systems architecture, software and applications support. We believe
that the integration of these capabilities enables us to optimize solutions
addressing the high-bandwidth connectivity requirements of market leading equipment
suppliers.
Acquire Complementary Businesses, Products or Technologies
A key element of our business strategy involves acquiring new businesses, products
or technologies that allow us to reduce the time required to develop and bring
to market new technologies and products, complement our existing product offerings,
expand our market coverage, or enhance our technological capabilities.
Increase the Number of Products we Provide to Address Specific Protocols and
Networking Functions
We focus our new product development efforts and acquisition activities on
product lines that are complementary to our current product portfolio in order
to broaden the number of products we provide to address specific protocols and
networking functions. For example, our current product offerings include physical
layer products, overhead processor products, and higher layer products for communications
applications, and HBAs and RAID controllers for enterprise storage applications.
Both communications and enterprise storage applications may use general purpose
processors, like the 400 series PowerPC processors acquired from IBM in May
2004. We believe that we will be able to increase our sales to existing customers
and increase our market share in the communications and storage enterprise markets
by taking advantage of product synergies and integration opportunities.
Increase our Market Share in Non-Solaris Storage Environments
Our HBAs have achieved their greatest market acceptance in computing environments
built with high-end servers from Sun Microsystems due to our products’ interoperability
with the Sun Solaris operating system. To increase our revenues and grow our
storage business we are focusing significant marketing and qualification efforts
on building market share with our newer products that interoperate with other
operating systems.
Competition
In the communications IC markets, we compete primarily against companies such
as Agere, Broadcom, Intel, Mindspeed, PMC-Sierra, and Vitesse. Our principal
competitors in the PCBA market are Adaptec, Emulex, Qlogic, Agilent, Hewlett-Packard
and LSI Logic. As a result of our acquisition of IBM’s 400 series of embedded
PowerPC standard products in May 2004, our list of competitors has been expanded
to include large technology companies such as Motorola and IBM. In addition,
certain of our customers and potential customers have internal IC or storage
design or manufacturing capability with which we compete.