Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments was founded in 1930 as Geophysical Service Inc., an oil-exploration company, before pivoting to electronics and giving birth to the integrated circuit in 1958 under Jack Kilby. The Dallas-based firm shed its memory-chip and mobile-processor businesses in the 2000s, narrowing its focus to analog semiconductors and embedded processors — the ubiquitous, low-cost chips that govern voltage, temperature, and motor control in every industrial application. The wealth or family-office framing does not apply here; TI is a publicly traded manufacturer whose capital discipline has made it a de facto study in operational returns. Strategy centers on manufacturing optionality. TI plows approximately 10% of revenue into capital expenditures, building 300mm wafer fabs in Sherman, Texas, and Lehi, Utah, that produce analog chips at cost structures competitors on 200mm lines cannot match. The company ships tens of thousands of products into automotive, industrial, and personal-electronics end markets, with no single customer exceeding 10% of revenue. Its product catalog exceeded 80,000 parts in 2023, and it maintains a direct sales model with more than 100,000 customers globally — a distribution moat that makes switching costs prohibitive. Confirmed positions include power-management chips for Tesla, driver-assistance processors for Toyota, and embedded controllers for Schneider Electric (public record). TI ended 2024 with roughly $34 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue and an operating margin near 45%, a figure that reflects the profitability of its analog franchise. Haviv Ilan, a 20-year company veteran who previously ran the analog segment, became CEO in April 2023 and immediately raised the long-term capex guidance to $5 billion annually through 2027. In February 2025, TI announced a 5% quarterly dividend increase — the 21st consecutive year of growth. The company employs roughly 34,000 people, with fabrication sites across Dallas, Richardson, Lehi, and Freising, Germany, alongside assembly/test facilities in Malaysia and the Philippines. What distinguishes TI structurally from peers like Analog Devices or NXP is its refusal to separate manufacturing from design. The firm operates as a fully integrated device manufacturer in an industry that has largely gone fabless, giving it control over process technology and inventory during cycles of shortage. That architecture creates a counter-cyclical procurement advantage: when competitors cut orders at third-party foundries, TI stockpiles inventory on its own lines, positioning itself to capture share when demand rebounds. No other analog semiconductor company operating at TI's scale maintains this level of in-house fabrication capacity.