CEO Sanders finds his successor at AMD
BY THERESE POLETTI
Mercury News
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has long been known as Jerry Sanders' company.
Sanders, the chip maker's flamboyant founder, has hired a number of potential successors over the years, only to ultimately reject them all.
Now, says Sanders, he's finally found the right man: Hector J. de Ruiz.
Earlier this year, AMD hired Ruiz, the former head of Motorola Inc.'s semiconductor operations, as president and chief operating officer.
Ruiz, 54, who cemented a relationship with Sanders while they were forming an alliance between AMD and Motorola to share flash and copper technologies, is expected to take over as chief executive sometime in the second half of 2002.
Sanders says he has an eye on retiring as CEO after he turns 65 in September 2002, and he plans to retire as chairman of the board a year after that.
Sanders will be a hard act for Ruiz to follow. The 22-year veteran of Motorola is as quiet and thoughtful as Sanders is charismatic and brash. AMD is synonymous with Sanders, and many of his employees seem to revere him. A bust of him sits in the glass-and-marble lobby of AMD's headquarters -- a gift to him from the company's sales force.
While Sanders has made headlines for his brutally frank remarks and his lavish lifestyle -- he has a home near Beverly Hills, a condo on San Francisco's Russian Hill and a bevy of flashy cars -- employees don't seem to mind.
Still, Ruiz is gradually putting his own stamp on the company. He routinely hosts quarterly burrito breakfasts at AMD's operations in Austin, where he works most of the time. He has also been asking employees to look for ``A Message to Garcia,'' a small book written at the turn of the century about a man who takes on and completes an impossible task without whining or questioning his superiors.
Modest dreams
Ruiz, who was born in a poor border town in Mexico on Christmas Day (his middle name is Jesus), never had any intention of going to college. But he got a job running errands for a Methodist missionary who taught him English, and she later offered to pay for one year at college if he got accepted. Ruiz ended up at the University of Texas in Austin, and later attended Rice University in Houston, where he got his Ph.D.
``I am an auto buff kind of guy,'' said the understated Ruiz. ``My dream was to own an auto repair shop.''
Some analysts say privately that they doubt Sanders will completely give up the reins of the company he has spent most of his life fighting for. Some even speculate that Ruiz was initially named to appease the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the big pension fund for state employees, which has spoken out against Sanders's multimillion-dollar salary and benefits package, including his company Mercedes and driver.
But Sanders insists that 2001 will be his last full year as CEO, and he expects to leave the company in strong shape.
He said that AMD has a good shot at achieving 30 percent market share in PC chips by next year. And ``since next year is my last full year as CEO, we will have profitable growth,'' he added. ``It's enlightened self-interest.'' (Sanders owns more than 1.9 million shares of AMD stock.)
Making the transition
Ruiz is prepared for the challenges that lie ahead, and he said that he hopes to have a seamless transition with Sanders.
``A lot of people criticized me at Motorola and said, `Why do you have a two-year transition?' '' Ruiz said. ``I think it's going to be helpful. I think it's going to be smoother than people realize.'' |
