Solutions

Global business enablement

Corporate restructuring

Organizational efficiency

Semiconductor business optimization

Global business enablement

It’s been said that the world is now flat—in other words you can do business everywhere, on a level playing field. Sadly this is a simplistic and over-optimistic view. The reality is that taking your business into new markets is challenging at many levels. Some of the key issues include:

  • Finding the right partners
  • Understanding the local culture
  • Working with the local legal and infrastructural environment
  • Developing awareness
  • Establishing the right segmentation and market analysis
  • Closing the first deals
  • Building a sustainable presence

Each of these tasks is challenging enough: to do all of them requires special experience. Our senior partners have direct experience across Europe and Asia, and we have specific capabilities that can reduce your risk and accelerate your entry to those markets.

For more information on how we can help you grow your business internationally, contact us.

Corporate restructuring

Sometimes restructuring is the best solution for an organization in times of change. Most executives assert that by the time they are ready to restructure, they wish they had started sooner.

Restructuring is a painful process for everybody involved, and for this reason many managers are reluctant to do it.

Interlink Partners has the experience and expertise to help you initiate and execute a repositioning of your organization successfully. As external advisors, we can stay above the politics and provide a fresh perspective. As always, pragmatism and rapid results are our watchword as we strive together with you to create an effective and successful organization that can sustain itself for the long term.

Our approach includes:

  • Capability analysis and audit
  • Goal setting based on capabilities
  • Identification and retention of key personnel
  • Cost management and reduction in force decision-making
  • Internal communication strategy
  • External positioning and communication.

Please contact us for a confidential discussion of your needs.

Organizational Efficiency

Your company may be hugely successful and well positioned within some of your target segments, but how do you know if you are effective in all the potential segments that would benefit from your products and services?

Establishing metrics and processes across segments to ensure the most profitable operation is a key capability for organizations as they evolve. As companies mature, they often stick with what they know, even when the market has changed. Robust processes to identify opportunities and measure success across new as well as pre-existing segments is a powerful profit driver.

Metrics and processes are important because business is about people. Your top people may be expert at driving current business, but they may be resistant to change and to the potential risk of new approaches. Leading change is a primary executive responsibility, and done well it makes the different between a vibrant or a stagnant company.

The key elements in this process are:

  • Definition of current status and processes
  • Internal and channel interviews to identify opportunities for improvement
  • Definition of altered processes and metrics
  • Identification of key personnel
  • Handoff with a practical operational plan.

For more information, please get in touch.

Semiconductor business optimization

The nature of the electronics food chain means that long-term differentiation is difficult. Some companies have it easier: specialized analog, a worldwide franchise in processor design, specialized memory architectures for example. But the bulk of semiconductor companies, while they may start with a strongly differentiated product, quickly find themselves operating in a standards-based, commodity-ridden business environment.

Standards are good: they help get technology adopted. But if your products are simply implementations of the standard, they are subject to commoditization, which leads to pricing pressure and low customer loyalty.

The challenge is that hardware design wins only last one generation, and you have to be the best in some meaningful sense to win each time. A purely hardware-based strategy for differentiation means you have to be clearly the best, generation after generation. You have to be the best in functionality, power consumption, level of integration, and price.

That’s a tall order for any company. It’s also hard to maintain, generation after generation.

Interlink Partners bring a deep understanding of the dynamics of semiconductors and the electronics ecosystem, from startup to Fortune 500, and from analog to digital SoC. From this experience we have distilled a set of processes for optimizing semiconductor companies in terms of a wide range of factors:

  • Fundamental product differentiation
  • Roadmapping
  • Ecosystem plays
  • Adjunct capabilities to extend the value proposition
  • User community leverage
  • System development enablement
  • Engagement in standards development
  • Market positioning and message strategy

Each of these areas represent significant and powerful ways to increase the stickiness and market power of your semiconductor products.

Our methodology is customized to your needs, combining executive interviews, practical workshops, hands-on strategy development, and executive support for implementation.

For more information and a confidential diagnostic interview, please contact us.