Dive Brief:

• Former Amazon executive Tim Stone is taking over as finance chief of GlobalFoundries, the chipmaker said.

• Stone brings more than two decades of corporate finance experience, mostly at Amazon, according to his LinkedIn profile. Among other roles, he previously served as CFO of Amazon’s cloud computing business, as well as its devices unit.

• He replaces David Reeder, who is leaving GlobalFoundries, according to a Tuesday press release. The company didn’t disclose the reason for Reeder’s departure, and a spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dive Insight:

The announcement coincided with news that GlobalFoundries’ revenue for its first quarter declined 5% year-over-year, to $1.84 billion.

“Similar to others in the industry, we believe that semiconductor inventories are coming down more slowly than previously expected, and that the rebalancing of demand will extend at least through the second quarter,” GlobalFoundries CEO Thomas Caulfield said during a Tuesday earnings call. The impact will be felt in markets such as smart mobile devices, communications, infrastructure, and data centers, as well as the lower end of the consumer and home electronics markets in general, he said.

Despite such headwinds, the company continues to see healthy demand in faster-growing markets such as industrial internet of things, aerospace and defense, and automotive, Caulfield said. The Malta, New York-based company continues to anticipate quarter-to-quarter “modest sequential growth” throughout the remainder of the year, he said.

Reeder said automotive will be a key area of focus for the company throughout 2023. 

“We have and will continue to allocate more of our existing capacity as well as add additional capacity to support the continued growth of silicon content within the automotive market,” he said during the call.

Reeder joined GlobalFoundries in August 2020, after serving as CEO of Tower Hill Insurance Group, a Florida-based provider of residential and commercial property insurance. He will leave GlobalFoundries in the next few “coming months,” after Stone has transitioned into his new role, according to the company’s release.

Stone left Amazon in 2018 after 20 years at the company to become CFO of Santa Monica, California-based social media company Snap. He later did CFO stints at Ford Motor and ASAPP, a New York-based AI software provider.

“Tim Stone brings a breadth of experience and has a track record of delivering business outcomes in fast-moving technology-enabled industries including automotive, a key pillar of GF’s growth strategy,” Caulfield said in the release.