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Kurt Sievers took over as NXP’s CEO in May 2020, in the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a June 2, 2020, interview with EE Times editor Junko Yoshida, he described a leadership transition built around continuity in NXP’s business and financial strategy, alongside further work on innovation culture and team collaboration. This is a historical account: NXP’s leadership page now lists Rafael Sotomayor as president and CEO, effective October 2025.
Who was Kurt Sievers when he became CEO?
Sievers was an internal successor with a long career at NXP and its predecessor Philips. He joined in 1995, had served as NXP’s president since 2018, and had been on the company’s executive management team since 2009. The 2020 interview describes NXP as an $8.88 billion company at that time; that figure is not a statement of current revenue.
Sievers told Yoshida that he had studied physics and information technology before taking his first private-sector job at Philips. He initially considered working in components, then accepted a product-engineering role in semiconductors focused on microcontrollers.
Read the original EE Times interview with Kurt Sievers for the full conversation.
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Would Sievers change NXP’s strategy?
His answer was largely no: he expected evolution, not a sudden strategic reset. Sievers said the business model, financial strategy, and important parts of the portfolio already reflected his input before he became CEO. He credited predecessor Rick Clemmer with reinforcing the need to focus investment on areas where NXP could outperform rather than chase every opportunity in the broad semiconductor market.
As Sievers put it, “We know what we do, and we know also what we do not do.” His remarks present the handover as continuity in what NXP chose to pursue, not a claim that the company would stand still.
What did he want to develop further?
An innovation culture
Sievers identified innovation culture as one area for continued development. In the interview, he described it as a leadership priority rather than announcing a specific program or measurable target. “One is what I call innovation culture,” he said.
Collaboration and team engagement
He also emphasized the people side of leadership. Semiconductor products and markets, in his view, are too complex for isolated teams: expertise in physics, software, and hardware has to come together. He described that cross-disciplinary collaboration and the engagement of employees as competitive strengths, saying, “Nobody can do it alone.”
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What did Sievers say about running NXP during COVID-19?
The interview captured his response to the pandemic in mid-2020, not a lasting statement of NXP policy. Sievers discussed employee safety, business continuity, customer supply chains, and whether remote research-and-development teams could continue work such as tape-outs and test-pattern development. His comments record his assessment of those challenges at that moment; they do not establish NXP’s current remote-work practices or pandemic performance.
What did he say about NXP’s business in China?
Sievers called China a significant market but did not give a current revenue percentage. The interview noted that NXP had cited China as 39 percent of revenue in 2012, then asked for a comparable figure. That 2012 figure should not be treated as NXP’s share in 2020 or today.
He explained why shipment destination can be an imperfect way to measure the market: a product shipped to China could have been made in Europe or the United States, incorporated into a module there, and later shipped onward for use elsewhere. The place a shipment is recorded, where a component is manufactured, and where it is ultimately used are not necessarily the same.
Asked about U.S. restrictions on certain Chinese companies, Sievers said NXP still had to comply with applicable export-control rules. He noted that requirements were changing frequently at the time. These were his June 2020 remarks, not current revenue data or compliance guidance.
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Sievers was “new” CEO in the context of Yoshida’s June 2020 interview. NXP’s official leadership page identifies Rafael Sotomayor as president and CEO, effective October 2025.
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