Vitesse Semiconductor CEO Christopher Gardner was named to his post after receiving a late night phone call in 2006 during a period of turmoil. At the time of his appointment, the Camarillo-based public company had been the subject of a stock option scandal that resulted in former executives leaving the company in disgrace and a delisting from the NASDAQ exchange, as well as several quarters of poor financial results. Gardner, who had been with the company for 20 years in various roles, was a natural successor for the company, as his experience ranged from designing semiconductor chips to dealing with Wall Street investors. Under his leadership, the company now has a market value of nearly $62 million on the NASDAQ exchange and employs more than 300 workers. “I had a good background in running all aspects of the company, so I probably was as prepared as I could have been,” for the role of CEO, Gardner said. Gardner is guiding Vitesse to a leading role in supplying chips for the telecommunication networks. For the quarter ended June 30, Vitesse reported net income of $4.7 million on revenues of $30.2 million. There isn’t a cell phone, smart phone, or tablet device in use today that isn’t somehow using a Vitesse semiconductor, Gardner said. A native East Coaster, Gardner first came to California to attend graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. His first job was with Bell Labs, a leading global research firm, and in 1986, he joined Vitesse, after several companies attempted to woo him. He said what drew him to Vitesse was the company’s high-caliber employees. Question: You employment contract as CEO was extended eight months ago. Are you reaching your goals? Answer: We are. Even in a very tough environment Vitesse has performed very well. We’ve had a couple of sequential quarters of profitability, which is nice. We continue to reach all our goals of transforming Vitesse into a leader in the communication segment. Q: What has been tough about the communications industry? A: Our business is driven by iPhone deployment and deployments of mobile apps that draw bandwidth and more data across the network. While that segment of communication is going well, the companies that deploy infrastructure, that is our customers… Cisco and Alcatel Lucent … have really had a difficult year, primarily because capital expenditures of the carriers has not been at the rate that had been expected. No one really knows why that is. A lot of it has to do with the macro-economic environment. Certainly, Europe is soft. China had been soft until recently, and people are hopeful that will turn around soon. Q: Vitesse recently expanded its presence in China and India. Are those important markets for the company? A: We have been in China and in India for a number of years. What we have done now is open an office in Shanghai, which increases our presence in that country, as well as put a distributor in place in India. India is a bit new. It is well known for its software technology, but it’s only been in the last year or two that we’ve seen equipment development — that is, the design and development of hardware — in India. So as our customers have moved there, we found it important to increase our presence there. Q: Will the company open any other overseas offices? A: We have offices across the world. We have development facilities across the world and the U.S., in Europe, and in Asia. At this point, we don’t see any further expansion. We have a good footprint from both the development and the sales side. Q: Where do Vitesse semiconductors fit in the telecommunications market? A: Our chips fit into the equipment that delivers both voice and data networks — anything that is connected to your carrier, to your Internet and to the data center that provides data to the Internet. That’s where our chips reside. It is virtually impossible to make a phone call today, or to send an email through the Internet, without it going through a piece of Vitesse silicon. Q: How has Vitesse positioned itself to supply to the world’s leading customers. A: Vitesse has been in existence for 28 years. Over that time, Vitesse has always been a leader in driving new trends in emerging communication technology. For example, we did the first product for SONET (Synchronous Optical Networking) in 1987. We did the first product for fiber channel with Seagate in disc drives in the early ‘90s. We are now leading that transition from that old SONET network, which we helped deploy through the ‘90s, to the new packet-based network that will support 3G and 4G communications capabilities. Q: Where is your manufacturing done? A: We are what is called a ‘fabless’ semiconductor company. As such, our wafer manufacturing and assembly and 90 percent of our testing is done overseas. We have a small prototype test floor here in Camarillo, so we support the test development technology here. Q: What challenges have you faced as CEO? A: Every 10, 20 years a company goes through changes, not only in their markets, but changes in their products. We’ve had to refocus the company almost entirely over the last five years. We were able to do that very successfully in a time that was a tough time for the company. Being able to handle both of those at the same time is a testament to the quality of the people, quality of the company, and the quality of the customers we’ve been able to put in place. If not for the value of our technology, I think Vitesse would have had to struggle to get through the last few years. Q: How has being located in Camarillo contributed to the company’s performance? A: What this area offers is a broad range of other industries. It offers a deeper mix of people you are going to interface with on a daily basis. Yet, it does offer a deep and growing capability in our specific industry. Here in Camarillo, we have a number of microwave technology companies. We have Semtech, another big IC (integrated circuit) company. Across the hill, we have companies like Inphi and Fulcrum, whose CEO is ex-Vitesse and many of their people are ex-Vitesse. There are more IC companies here than you would expect. Most of them are in some way related to the Rockwell Science Center, which was big back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Some of our founders came out of that organization. Q: What motivates you? A: The motivation of all of us is to be successful. We are competitive by nature. We like to win. As a technology company, you do that with your technology, your products, and your people. One thing that allowed Vitesse to survive, and in fact prosper through this, is the quality of our people. We have fun things to do every day, challenging things to do every day. We want to push this company where it should be, which is to be a leader in what we do. Q: What is your life like outside of work? A: CEOs don’t have much of a life outside of work. I used to play golf, and I now play twice a year. I try to get a little exercise, try to travel a little bit, usually somehow related to work. The job of a public company CEO is 24 hours. Most of what I do is in, at or around what I am doing for Vitesse. Q: Do you have a typical day? A: I try to get started early. I challenge our CFO (Martin S. McDermut) — we normally are fighting to get the second parking spot. We have someone here at 6:15 a.m., and I don’t beat her very often. My calendar always gets filled up. It starts early and ends late. We do a fair amount of travel. I’m the No. 1 sales guy for the company. I’m the No. 1 public voice for the company. So between customers, suppliers, investors and others there are always plenty of folks to go visit. United Airlines probably knows me as well as the average employee. Q: What kind of smart device do you have? A: I have an iPhone. I am not a gadget guy. My wife always comments on that. I am not a gadget guy because as an engineer I pick up any gadget, even the pretty good ones from Apple, and I typically have issues. This doesn’t work right or why did they design it like that. A lot of these gadgets are a bit frustrating to me. In a lot of ways, they can be a distraction but at the end of the day they are driving our business. The more people who go from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 5, the more people who use 4G and LTE — all those trends are great for Vitesse.
Steady Hand
