Yahoo Finance Japan’s Advantest Taps American Lefever to Become Next CEO
(Bloomberg) -- Advantest Corp. said it will promote Douglas Lefever to chief executive officer as of April 1, a rare example of a foreign citizen taking the helm of a major Japanese corporation.
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Lefever, a 53-year-old American, will take over the semiconductor testing company after working there since 1998, most recently as chief operating officer and chief strategy officer. Lefever was instrumental in Advantest’s acquisition of smaller rival Verigy Ltd. in 2011, according to outgoing CEO Yoshiaki Yoshida. Yoshida will serve as chairman.
The world’s biggest maker of chip testing tools has benefited from growing investor focus on semiconductors that’s driven up shares at other gear makers like ASML Holding NV and Tokyo Electron Ltd. Advantest’s clients such as Nvidia Corp. argue that the industry doesn’t have enough capacity to meet potential demand for artificial-intelligence chips and services, fueling expectations of rising investments in production. Advantest’s stock price has climbed 44% this year already, hitting record highs.
The Tokyo-based company is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, Lefever said. “There’s a reason why we’ve been able to be a great company for so long, and it’s that we have a long-term vision,” he said at a news conference Wednesday in Tokyo.
To keep up with rapid technological change and rising complexity in semiconductors, Advantest will need to play an even larger role in helping customers get their products to market and align its product road map to theirs, he said. “This will require additional investment and also deep partnerships with both our customers and ecosystem partners, and we really do accept this responsibility,” he said.
Last year, the company’s chief strategy officer said Advantest was seeing a spike in demand for its products because of the frenzy of interest set off by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other potential AI services. Advantest’s shares have soared more than 150% over the past year.
Lefever, who joins a short list of non-Japanese leading the country’s companies, graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in mechanical engineering. He then received a master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Northwestern University.
“I consider this company to be a big part of who I am as a person,” he said. “It’s much more than a company to me, it’s a big part of my whole life.”
(Updates with executive comments from news conference.)
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