Nokia is expected to show a steep fall in network equipment sales in its results this week, highlighting the challenge facing management after selling its once mighty handset division to Microsoft for EUR5.4 billion (US$7.3 billion).

The smartphone vendor's COO and CMO will leave the company.

Spansion has announced a complete family of microcontrollers addressing high performance and low power needs for industrial applications such as factory automation, building management, inverter drives, smart meters, home appliances and medical devices.

A consortium that includes the wireless company Qualcomm, the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management and BlackBerry's co-founders, Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, is preparing a bid for the company ahead of a Monday deadline, according to people briefed on the process.

The company has concluded a review of strategic alternatives and Announced changes to its board and leadership team.

Flextronics and Motorola Mobility have signed a definitive agreement, under which Flextronics will acquire Motorola's manufacturing operations in Tianjin, China, and will also assume the management and operation of its Jaguariuna, Brazil, facility.

For the first quarter of fiscal year 2013 Infineon expects a revenue decline of up to 10% relative to the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year. The management board will define and implement measures to improve profitability beyond the first quarter of the 2013 fiscal year.

UMC has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Allegro for Allegro to utilize UMC for foundry technology and production for power management chips.

Prior to joining Globalfoundries, Chen held key senior management positions in Marvell where he was responsible for sales, support and customer service for the company's business in China.

On Tuesday, the group - Linden Advisors, LIM Advisors, Owl Creek Asset Management and Taconic Capital Advisors - reiterated its opposition to Micron Technology?嚙編 US$2.5 billion offer for Elpida.

"People are starting to position bankruptcy filing as a way to rebuild the company, and that's becoming more acceptable," says Mitsushige Akino, a chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management. "If more cases like JAL emerge, it will help to revitalize the Japanese market, as well as the economy."

Sony announced today that it is shaking up its management structure in an effort to avoid yet another year of losses.

Dialog Semiconductor has announced it is working closely with TSMC to develop its next generation of bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology specifically tailored to high-performance power management ICs (PMICs) for portable devices.

Corning has announced that the company's board of directors is expected to elect David L Morse as executive vice president and chief technology officer at its meeting on April 26, 2012. His appointment will be effective May 1, at which time he will also become a member of Corning's management committee.

Mobile World Congress attendees hoping to see the first smartphones with quad-core SnapDragon processors on board had better brace for disappointment. There won't be any, said Qualcomm VP of product management Raj Talluri, unless you count the concepts touted by phone vendors and chip suppliers.

Flash memory vendor SanDisk is looking for a director of processing engineering management for a 3-D resistive RAM team based in Milpitas. A job ad for the position was posted in SanDisk's website dated Feb. 15, 2012.

Prior to joining Globalfoundries, Michael Noonen served as executive vice president, sales and marketing as a member of NXP Semiconductors' executive management team from 2008 to 2011.

The acquisition is one of the most expensive for Apple since it acquired NeXT in 1996 - 15 years ago to the day, in fact-and should cement the company's strategic shift to solid-state flash storage for its products.

Infineon has announced another reshuffle of its structure and management that it hopes will make it less vulnerable to economic downturns and help it tap into growth in China.

"Michael Woodford has largely diverted from the rest of the management team in regard to the management direction and method and it is now causing problems for decision-making by the management team," the company said in a statement.

Maxim Integrated Products has unveiled several organization changes to better serve its customers.

Texas Instruments (TI) has shipped more than 30 million units of its PowerStack packaging technology, which significantly boosts performance, lowers power and improves chip densities in power management devices.

Research in Motion is to slash its workforce by over 10% as it kicks off a company-wide cost-cutting drive.

A recent survey of 344 senior financial executives by Gartner and two financial management associations found that CFOs "authorized" 26% of IT investments.

Lenovo outpaced Acer to become the number 3 vendor worldwide, according to IDC. Acer's shipments continued to decline from a year ago, but at a slower pace than in the first quarter as the company was affected by a review of inventory handling, as well uncertainties from its recent management shake-up.

Management changes recently announced at Globalfoundries are related to problems with 32nm chip yield and the slowness of creating a foundry-like operation at Globalfoundries' Dresden facility in Germany, according to analysts at Nomura Equity Research.

Growing global demand has fuelled a surge in US manufacturing activity, which last month (Feb. 2011) accelerated at its fastest rate in almost seven years, according to the Institute of Supply Management.

Hans Stork joins ON Semiconductor after three years with Applied Materials as Group VP of the Si Systems Group and six years with Texas Instruments as the company's CTO and Senior VP of Si Technology Development.

"I don't envision us using Microsoft. I would never say never but it's not something we're entertaining now," said Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services product management for Motorola.

Micron says some flash controller jobs are going to migrate down stack towards the NAND chips, freeing up controller manufacturers from chip-dependent work they shouldn't be doing. It sees low-level flash controllers developing and taking on error management, taking this job away from existing NAND controllers.

Apple, HTC and RIM was sued by patent holder St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants for alleged infringement of six U.S. patents for computer-function management.

Koo Bon-joon, the head of trading firm LG International, will take over from Nam Yong, who resigned from the top job to take responsibility for poor management, LG said on Friday.

The prototype suggests future products could eliminate the cost and bulk of for power management conversion circuitry OLEDs need today.

A "lost decade" in US employment reflects a change in the structure of the nation's labor market, according to Mohamed El-Erian, CEO at Pacific Investment Management Co.