A decade ago, when Lisa Su was CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the company hardly looked like a multibillion-dollar company.
AMD stock price is hovering around $3 per share. The company laid off approximately 25% of its workforce, according to time. But under Su’s leadership, the chipmaker thrived: Today, AMD has a market capitalization of $205.95 billion, and its stock trades at about $127 a share.
On Tuesday, Su was named Time magazine’s 2024 CEO of the Year, and the 55-year-old’s net worth has soared — as much as $1.3 billion — on the back of AMD’s success. Forbes estimates April. By comparison, Sue received a base salary of $1 million and a performance bonus of $1.2 million when he took over as CEO in 2014. seattle times 2020 coverage.
Su was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was three so her mathematician father could attend graduate school in New York. Growing up, “my dad would often test me with math tables at the dinner table,” she told me Forbes last year. “That’s how I first encountered mathematics.”
Sue was not initially interested in following in her father’s footsteps and entering a STEM career. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, she says: “I wasn’t good enough, so I became an engineer.”
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She earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from MIT and held various positions in the 1990s at Texas Instruments and IBM, two large technology companies at the time.
“Early on in my career, I was really lucky,” Sue told Time. “Every two years, I do something different.”
It is understood that in 2012, Su was hired by AMD as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s global business unit. Her LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she was promoted to CEO, becoming the first woman to lead AMD since the company’s founding in 1969.
“I feel like I’m being trained to have a chance to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” she said. “AMD is my choice.”
fight a protracted war
Sue is one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs with a Ph.D. Her engineering background has helped her spearhead some of the technological innovations that have fueled AMD’s recent success, including new, faster CPU chips for computers.
Friends and colleagues describe her as a “shrewd strategist” who sometimes According to Time magazine, the company held meetings over the weekend and asked employees to work until after midnight. Patrick Moorhead, a technology industry analyst and former AMD executive, told the magazine that her high expectations could make long-term survival at AMD challenging.
This may be intentional: “I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” Su said.
According to Time magazine, after becoming CEO, Su laid out a three-part plan to help AMD compete with rivals Intel and Nvidia: sell only high-quality products, deepen customer trust and simplify the company’s operations. .The long-term plan takes time to pay dividends, but by 2022, AMD surpassed Intel in both market cap and annual revenue.
Nvidia, on the other hand, is not only the world’s largest chipmaker, it recently surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable public company. But Sue measures success in decades, not quarters, she said.
“When you invest in a new field, it takes five to 10 years to actually build all the various pieces,” Su said. “The problem with our business is, everything takes time.”
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