Telecom Lead Asia: Spreadtrum Communications has terminated the employment of Chief Technology Officer Qiuzhen (Joe) Zou.
The fabless semiconductor provider in China with advanced technology in 2G, 3G and 4G wireless communications standards did not share reasons for sacking the CTO.
Spreadtrum says Zou will be eligible for the relevant severance benefits.
Spreadtrum does not intend to replace the position in the immediate future, and has made plans for Zou’s responsibilities to be assumed by other members of the company’s senior engineering management.
For the quarter, Spreadtrum posted revenue of $203.1 million, up 8.1 percent sequentially and 5.7 percent year-over-year.
In February 2013, CEO Leo Li said: “In particular, we achieved a very fast ramp in our smartphone business, which accounted for more than fifty percent of revenue in the quarter. In addition, we further expanded our business with first tier handset makers and operators, starting shipments of our 40nm GPRS/GSM baseband and low-cost TD-SCDMA smartphone chipset to Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone vendor.”
Its dual-core 1.2GHz TD-SCDMA/EDGE smartphone platform is now in the final stages of qualification with China Mobile and we expect it to be shipping in customer handsets in the very near future. This and other dual-core and quad-core smartphone products supporting TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and LTE will expand its addressable market, improve product mix.
Spreadtrum aims to achieve evenue of $180 million to $186 million, ahead of the Street at $171.6 million. That’s down 8.4 percent to 11.4 percent sequentially, but reflects better-than-seasonal performance, with flat gross margins compared with Q4.
