Chipmaker Micron Technology Inc. vowed to shareholders for a decade to broaden products to boost its share price and avoid those stomach-churning profit-to-loss swings that have dominated its 32-year history.
After reporting its first profit in four years, Chief Operating Officer Mark Durcan now must prove Micron’s diversification spree — away from memory chips for personal computers and into products for cell phones, cars, security systems, iPods and even solar energy — will keep the company from crashing just as swiftly back into the red.
Boise-based Micron has made money just four of the last 10 years. Its shares trade around $8, down 30 percent this year even after earning $1.9 billion, its best year ever.
In other words, Durcan, a chemical engineer who arrived in Boise in 1984 and became president in 2007, still has his work cut out for him before investors really believe this isn’t the old Micron.
“We have a really great product portfolio, diversified across a lot of markets, that’s going to give us a lot of room to outperform, going forward,” Durcan told The Associated Press. “We are the only surviving memory manufacturer in the western world. I feel pretty good about that.”
A decade ago, virtually all of Micron’s sales were to PC makers like Compaq and Gateway.
Today, just a quarter of its sales of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, are to PC makers.
In 2006, half of Micron’s 23,000 employees were at facilities in the desert outside Boise.
It now makes virtually nothing in Idaho’s capital, where the 5,000 local workers whose jobs survived the restructuring of the last five years now focus on corporate activities and research. They represent just a quarter of Micron’s more than 20,000 workers worldwide, in Virginia and Utah as well as Italy, Israel, Singapore, China and Malaysia.
Its NAND flash memory chips, made…