The story
Founded by SGS Microelettronica in 1987.1
Background
ST was formed in 1987 by the merger of two government-owned semiconductor companies: Italian SGS Microelettronica (where SGS stands for Società Generale Semiconduttori, "General Semiconductor Company"), and French Thomson Semiconducteurs, the semiconductor arm of Thomson.
SGS Microelettronica originated in 1972 from the merger of two companies (the L'Aquila-based vacuum tube and semiconductor producer ATES (Aquila Tubi e Semiconduttori), and the Agrate Brianza-headquartered semiconductor specialist Società Generale Semiconduttori). By the mid-1980s, SGS had been under pressure from multiple larger American competitors, including Texas Instruments and Motorola.
Thomson Semiconducteurs was created in 1982 by the French government's widespread nationalization of industries following the election of François Mitterrand to the presidency. It comprised the semiconductor activities of the French electronics company Thomson; the US-based firm Mostek (bought from United Technologies in 1985); Silec (established in 1977); Eurotechnique (founded in 1979 as a joint venture between Saint-Gobain of France and US-based National Semiconductor); EFCIS (formerly known as CEA-Leti); and SESCOSEM (founded in 1969). While Thomson Semiconducteurs was both loss-making and bureaucratic, it had conducted advanced research into emerging chip technologies.
The motivation for the cross-border merger that created ST came from both political and economic sources. By creating SGS-Thomson Microelectronics as a new entity headquartered in Geneva, politicians in both France and Italy sought to create a more powerful European company that could stand up against American dominance of the industry, and even prevent Europe from greater dependence on imported technology. Furthermore, both SGS and Thomson already cooperated in some areas, including a strategic alliance to develop and produce non-volatile memory. Upon its creation in 1987, this new corporation was named SGS-THOMSON and headed by chief executive officer Pasquale Pistorio.
Early activities
Shortly after its establishment, SGS-Thomson was the 14th largest semiconductor suppliers, recording US$850 million sales. Rather that competing head-to-head with its largest competitors, the early business strategy of STM was to orient towards various niches of the market that possessed high growth potential, which included sensors, microcontrollers, power electronics, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). One key early example of this strategy took place in 1989, when STM produced a chip that integrated power supply and power management functions that improved the performance of the mobile phones produced by the Finnish firm Nokia. Furthermore, in contrast to many American and Japanese chip manufacturers that chose to halt production of analogue chips in favour of digital ones during the 1980s, ST retained its analogue capacity, which was required for managing power, radio frequency transmission, sound, and graphics; accordingly ST was well-positioned when such chips were needed in volume during the 1990s in growth areas such as mobile phones, wireless computers, and consumer devices such as DVD players.
Early on, ST entered into prosperous strategic alliances with the French firms Thomson Multimedia and Alcatel (in the consumer electronics and telecommunications sectors respectively). Recognising that the largest growth opportunities were in the wider international market, senior management successfully secured its first major oversea alliance with Seagate Technology, the world's largest producer of hard drives. Under this alliance, ST used its custom chips to develop smaller, cheaper, and more energy-efficient drives; accordingly, Seagate became one of ST's largest customers. ST typically pursued a strategy of gradually deepening its business relationships, over a ten year period, Nokia elevated ST from being an ordinary supplier, to a premier supplier, and then to a partner.
Throughout the 1990s, STM pursued vertical integration, performing the design, manufacture, and testing of its own semiconductors inhouse; this was in contrast to most European-based electronics firms, which were typically either downsizing or outsourcing production to other parties. The company experienced double-digit growth during the early 1990s.
On 8 December 1994, the company completed its initial public offering on the Paris and New York stock exchanges. Owner Thomson SA sold its stake in the company in 1998 when the company also listed on the Italian Bourse in Milan, after which the firm adopted its current name of STMicroelectronics.
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ST has been an active participating in the consolidation of the semiconductor industry. Between 1989 and 2000, it acquired numerous other companies. In 1989, it bought the British company Inmos, known for its transputer microprocessors, from parent Thorn EMI. In 1999, it acquired the research & development company UK-based VLSI-Vision CMOS Image Sensor, which had been a spin-off from Edinburgh University; following the purchase, it became STMicroelectronics' Imaging Division. In 2000, it purchased the semiconductor activities of the Canadian telecoms firm Nortel. That same year, ST also bought WaferScale Integration Inc. (WSI, Fremont, California), a vendor of EPROM and flash-memory-based programmable system chips;
2000s
In 2001, ST became the third largest chipmaker (in terms of sales) behind Intel and Toshiba and had operations across 27 countries. Bolstered by no less than 31 separate strategic alliances, the firm had experienced a compound average revenue growth rate of 20.3 percent between 1998 and 2001. Another factor credited for ST's strong performance was its decentralised corporate organisation, which minimised overhead and hierarchy and left many impactful decisions to peripherical figures. The firm's customer base comprised a wide array of manufacturers across the consumer electronics, telecommunications, computer peripherals, automobiles, and security sectors.
In 2002, Motorola and TSMC joined ST and Philips in a new technology partnership; the Crolles 2 Alliance was created, being named after a new 12" wafer manufacturing facility located in Crolles, France. Also in 2002, Alcatel's Microelectronics division, which along with the incorporation of smaller ventures such as the UK company Synad Ltd, was acquired by ST, helping the company expand into the Wireless-LAN market. In 2007, the US-based video processing specialist Genesis Microchip was also bought.
In 2005, long-running chief executive officer Pasquale Pistorio was succeeded by Carlo Bozotti, who had previously headed the memory products division and had been with the company's predecessor since 1977. That same year, ST was ranked fifth, behind Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Toshiba, but ahead of Infineon, Renesas, NEC, NXP Semiconductors and Freescale. The company was the largest European semiconductors supplier, ahead of Infineon and NXP.
Early in 2007, NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors) and Freescale (formerly Motorola Semiconductors) decided to stop their participation in the Crolles 2 Alliance. Accordingly, this Alliance came to an end on 31 December 2007. On 22 May 2007, ST and Intel created a joint venture in the memory application called Numonyx: this new company merged ST and Intel Flash Memory activities. Semiconductor market consolidation continued with ST and NXP announcing on 10 April 2008, the creation of a new joint venture of their mobile activities, with ST owning 80% of the new company and NXP 20%. This joint venture began on 20 August 2008. On 10 February 2009, ST Ericsson, a joint venture bringing together ST-NXP Wireless and Ericsson Mobile Platforms, was established.
2010s
During the early 2010s, ST Ericsson, a 50/50 joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Ericsson, was active as a multinational manufacturer of wireless products and semiconductors that were typically supplied to mobile device manufacturers. Headquartered in Geneva, it was a fabless company, outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing to foundry companies. In March 2013, it was announced that ST Ericsson would be dissolved; ST took on all of ST-Ericsson products except for the LTE multimode modem that was transferred to Ericsson.
In 2011, ST announced the creation of a joint lab with Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies to conduct research and innovation in the fields of biorobotics, smart systems and microelectronics. Past collaborations with Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies included DustBot, a platform that integrated self-navigating "service robots" for waste collection.
During 2012, ST was reported to be the third largest R&D budget across the global semiconductor industry, behind only Intel and Samsung. Three years later, the MEMS division of ST was ranked as the biggest European competitor of Silex Microsystems.
Starting in 2015, ST and SpaceX have collaborated on design of custom-made components for satellite communication. Starlink products have been co-designed with ST engineers located in France and Italy, produced in fabs located in France while packaging and testing was performed in both Malaysia and Malta. Amongst other elements, ST is responsible for the manufacture of the Starlink user terminals.
In 2018, chief executive Carlo Bozotti was succeeded by Jean-Marc Chery.
2020s
In 2023, ST partnered with Synopsys to design a working chip on Microsoft's cloud platform, marking the first instance that artificial intelligence (AI) software had been utilized for chip design.
In 2024, ST became the sixth shareholder of Quintauris, a joint company with the goal of standardizing RISC-V ecosystem.
In 2025, the Italian government was reportedly seeking greater oversight of ST, and sought to appoint Marcello Sala, head of the economy ministry's department overseeing state-run firms and asset disposals, to ST's supervisory board; this was allegedly motived by the company's planned $300 million cost-cutting program that could have involved more than 2,000 job cuts in Italy. According to the company, 1,000 of the 2,800 positions to be eliminated around the world will be in France.
On 3 June 2025, the ST division of France's General Confederation of Labour published a letter to ST leadership, criticising their relationship with Israel's military in the context of the Gaza genocide, such as the "ST-Up" startup incubator, which has been linked to "infiniDome", a startup developing GPS technology for drones, and "Lidwave", a startup developing real-time 4D mapping services, both allegedly intended for use by the IDF. As part of industrial action, CGT members at an STMicroelectronics factory in France engaged in a work stoppage against the company's provision of chips and semiconductors for the Israeli military.
In 2025, it was announced that ST had delivered in excess of five billion radio-frequency antenna chips for SpaceX's Starlink satellite network over a ten year period, and that this volume could be set to double within two years.
In 2025, ST launched a new chip oriented towards the AI data centre market, the firm had co-developed this chip with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In February 2026, ST started the supply a range of chip solutions for AWS' data centres under a multi-year deal that was valued in excess of $1 billion. One month later, it launched high-volume production of its PIC100 photonics chip, which is targeted at the data centre market.
From Wikipedia’s article on STMicroelectronics, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.8