Strategy and Competitive Advantage

Cirrus Logic puts a great deal of effort into hiring and maintaining the very best talent that is available to keep our products at the highest performance levels. We possess a knowledgeable employee staff, with over 50% of our engineers holding advanced engineering degrees. Additionally, 35% of employees in our non-product development groups such as marketing and sales also hold engineering degrees.

Along with attracting the best employees, we work hard to keep those valuable people on board and keep them satisfied. We encourage a strong work ethic by always keeping our employee's morale high. Hosting weekly happy hours as well as a monthly concert series in which employees' family and friends are invited to come enjoy free food and watch local bands perform at our facility are just some of the ways in which we aim to keep our employees feeling fulfilled at work. Our attempts have been proven successful as revealed by our showings in the "Best Companies to Work in Texas" rankings for in 2009 and 2010.

Something about our company that we find beneficial, although it may not generally be perceived as such, is our size. With only a little over 700 employees worldwide, Cirrus Logic competes against numerous companies in the semiconductor industry that are considerably larger in size. How this benefits us, is that instead of being spread thin from working on a large number of products, it allows us to focus more intimately on the smaller range of things it is we do. We build close relationships with our customers and this focus enables us to create customized products to their liking.

Our fabless supply chain model is a key advantage, in both technological and financial aspects. By being fabless, Cirrus Logic is not beholden to predetermined technology nodes, but rather can choose the fab technology that best suits the innovative designs we are working on. Financially, our fabless model provides us leverage during economic downturns as we can search for lower costs from our suppliers. During economic upturns, when capacity constraints arise, our fabless model allows us to design and build our products with various fab partners to ease supply chain concerns.

At Cirrus Logic, we believe that having strong management as a foundation is essential for running any good business. Our highly experienced team of executives, who all have a history of holding diverse leadership roles here at Cirrus Logic as well as various other leading semiconductor companies, set goals and pursue them with passion and determination. With a combined average of 21 years of semiconductor experience, our team has been committed to continuously improving the company's operating performance.