Freescale mum on new Malaysia Airlines reports
By Brian Gaar
American-Statesman Staff
Officials at Austin-based Freescale Semiconductor Ltd. had no public response Monday to new reports that it appears the missing Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 20 Freescale employees likely crashed into the Indian Ocean, killing all aboard.
Freescale previously confirmed that the 20 employees — 12 from Malaysia and eight from China — were among 239 people on flight MH370. The company has not released the names of those employees, and again declined to do so on Monday.
“Out of respect for the families’ privacy during this difficult time, we will not be releasing the names of the employees who were on board the flight at this time,” Freescale spokeswoman Jacey Zuniga said.
Earlier this month, Mitch Haws, Freescale’s vice president, global communications and investor relations, said the employees came from a range of disciplines and were part of a broad push by CEO Gregg Lowe to make Freescale more efficient and cost-effective.
While the employees on the flight account for less than 1 percent of Freescale’s global workforce of close to 17,000, they were working toward the same goals, and their loss will reverberate throughout Freescale, Haws said.
“These were people with a lot of experience and technical background and they were very important people, ” Haws said. “It’s definitely a loss for the company.”
The company, which employs 5,000 people in Austin, is a leading supplier of semiconductor chips for the automotive and digital network industries. The missing employees aboard the Malaysia Airlines jet had been working to streamline facilities in Tianjin, China, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that Freescale uses for testing and packaging microchips used in automobiles, consumer products, telecommunications infrastructure and industrial equipment.