IT IS not David, it is Dave. For some, Dave Shrigley is still the new chief executive of Wolfson Microelectronics, even though he replaced the popular and highly regarded founder of the business, David Milne, at the beginning of last year.
To many in Scotland, Wolfson is no mere designer and producer of semiconductor chips – it is an icon of Scotland's capability to invent and then commercialise that invention. Its success as a listed, research and development-driven business spun out
of clever university-born technology often makes people forget it took more than 20 years of struggling hand-to-mouth, barely surviving on drip feeds of fundraisings until it finally listed on Aim in 2003 and started delivering profits and returns to investors.
Who could lead it after Milne, a PhD in physics with a toothy grin and a bullish manner? The answer was Shrigley. An American-born marketing man with an impressive career spanning semiconductor chips, high-speed telecommunication routers and networks as well as venture capital; the two men could not have been more different.
At the time Milne said Shrigley was "an excellent replacement" that allowed him to hasten his retirement in advance of turning 65. Now, although Milne is still on the board, he refuses to speak about Shrigley.
Wolfson's chips, which turn digital signals into high-quality analogue sound, are used in equally iconic products – Apple's iPod and iPhone, as well as satnavs, wide screen TVs – in anything digital that needs to make sound sound better.
And while Wolfson may be a key operator in Scotland's technology sector, it doesn't mean it isn't always on the edge of becoming obsolete.
Challenges for Shrigley came fast and hard after he took the top job.
Wolfson must abide by strict non-disclosure agreements with its big clients, but it is well known that Apple is the company's largest customer.
Last September Apple replaced the Wolfson audio "codex" in the relaunch of its iPod Classic with a cheaper version. Then in March, the US computer giant again slighted Wolfson, which lost the business for the next generation of iPod Nanos, due out before Christmas. On both occasions, the company's share price slumped.
Clearly Wolfson must break its reliance on Apple. The problem is no-one knows what the next big thing in electronics will be. Nevertheless, Shrigley has been readying Wolfson for it.
Next week the group will probably reveal second-quarter revenues up only slightly on last year, but despite a downturn in sales of gadgets.
Although the Asian market for gadgets is thriving, it is decidedly mass market. Wolfson's speciality is the high end of the market, which is vulnerable to slow downs.
Shrigley's aim is to triple Wolfson's potential market by 2011. He's a firm believer that consumers will increasingly demand quality audio in their devices, and they will continue to pay for it.
His baby is the group's new "AudioPlus" range of products. Using the talent-spotting skills he honed as a general partner in a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, he made some early acquisitions when he arrived. They were tiny little companies – Sonaptic and Oligon – but they brought in some key technologies that promise improved power usage, preventing too rapid drain on batteries, as well as noise cancellation.
Shrigley has promised to unveil the fruits of these strategies in the second half of 2008, but some remain sceptical. Among the powerful analyst community, which shapes investor response to companies, there are those that have yet to warm to Shrigley. They wonder why he came to Edinburgh.
"He probably went a bit too US corporate at the beginning but he has put in a much better infrastructure to enable the business to grow," admits one regular analyst.
"The key is getting in these new products. He would probably like to do more acquisitions but at the moment he is hamstrung by the City that wouldn't be responsive to that."
But his friends say Shrigley was itching to get back into running a company. A fellow partner at Severn Rosen, Steve Domenik, said: "Dave really likes the operational side of things. One thing about the venture business is at the end of the day you are not the executive, you are the coach, and maybe not even the coach. If the board don't accept you as a coach, you are just a board member."
Unlike many in the high tech league he is a marketing man, not an electronics engineer.
The Columbus, Ohio-born Shrigley studied locally, graduating with a degree in business administration from the not particularly distinguished Franklin University. Nonetheless he has managed to straddle the divide – he holds patents on erasable memory chip encryption.
Shrigley made his mark during his career at Intel, where he grew Intel's Asian chip business tenfold. It was at Intel where he met his mentor, another David. David House remains somewhat of a Silicon Valley legend for his no-nonsense leadership and his penchant for heli-skiing. House describes Shrigley as "one of the most creative and aggressive sales and marketing executives in high technology". Together the two developed Intel's famous branding "Intel Inside", that first brought the grey incomprehensible innards of the machine to the forefront of consumer awareness.
Snubbed for the top job at Intel, House took Shrigley with him when he went to Bay Networks in 1996. Then a troubled network hardware company that haemorrhaged money after a botched merger, two years later, they sold it to Canadian telecoms giant Nortel.
House retired while Shrigley left to immerse himself in the white-hot centre of the dot.com boom, Menlo Park in Palo Alto, California. Acting for Severn Rosen, Shrigley brought big corporate discipline to the boards of a number of technology start-ups, including UK-based Southampton Photonics.
Like any number of promising telecoms start-ups in that era, where there was more money than business sense, Southampton Photonics' model failed miserably in 2002. Shrigley was involved in "restarting" the business.
"Working with people like Dave we did a right-down-the-roots-level rebuild of the business," says yet another David, David Parker, chief executive of the business, now renamed SPI Lasers.
For Shrigley, Wolfson is likely to be his last big job, where he says he plans to stay "indefinitely". His legacy will be driving Wolfson forward.
"He is very much a go-forward sort of guy," says Parker.
"He is very focused, very pointed, calls a spade a spade, but does it in a way that is wrapped up in having enthusiasm for the success of the business that just energises people."
The full article contains 1112 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
