A year after a management shakeup this microsensor company is chugging ahead. Now, if it could only get some of Apple’s business
Ten-year-old InvenSense rarely causes a ripple on anyone’s radar. But on September 20, as Apple’s iPhone 5s hit retail shelves, industry players speculated that the components maker had hit pay dirt, muscling out larger rival STMicroelectronics. Weeks before the release, anticipating that long-awaited debut, investors bid up the stock 15 percent.
InvenSense plays in the $9 billion niche of the semiconductor market called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), sensors with moving parts so small they can be seen only through a microscope. The components tell your smartphone or tablet if it’s being tilted, twisted, shaken, turned left or right and how fast; compass sensors indicate which way is north and help power onboard GPS.
As tech bloggers ripped open the latest iPhone to anatomise its guts, a ritual known as a “teardown”, you could sense deflation. Inside: An STMicro gyroscope, a compass made by Asahi Kasei Microdevices and a Bosch Sensortec accelerometer.
InvenSense shares opened 3 percent lower. No matter. The stock more than recovered within a week—it’s up 60 percent this year—as investors recovered their senses. The company has shipped 120 million or so units this year to Samsung, Motorola, BlackBerry, HTC, Acer, LG and the Nintendo Wii—70 percent of multi-motion-sensor Android phones and 80 percent of sensing tablets. Over the most recent 12 months it netted $54 million on revenue of $208 million.
Another tumultuous, if little noticed, week in the life of InvenSense. Hardly anyone seemed to register the seismic change last October, either, when the board ousted founder and CEO Steve Nasiri and replaced him with tech veteran Behrooz Abdi. It was a classic entrepreneurial putsch: Get rid of the visionary, do-it-all-yourself guy and bring on the management expert who can scale the company.
“Some board members wanted to influence day-to-day direction of the company,” says Nasiri, 58, who now consults to startups. “I disagreed.” Abdi, 51, who did time at NetLogic Microsystems, RMI Corp and Qualcomm, sees it differently. “As we get bigger, it really gets more complex,” he says. “People felt it needed a new phase of leadership.” Abdi consults with nine vice presidents before making most decisions.
(This story appears in the 15 November, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)