Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) is opening a development center in Ra'anana. The new center will be staffed by 100-150 employees who were fired several weeks ago by chipmaker Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE: TXN) (TI), which decided to lay off 250 employees - most of the staff at its Israel development center.
The new Apple development center in the Ra'anana Industrial Zone will be the company's third in Israel after it opened a development center in Haifa last year and acquired flash memory developer Anobit in Herzliya.
TI announced in November that it was laying off 1,700 employees worldwide in an attempt to significantly reduce expenditure. Most of the layoffs were in the wireless communications sector. In Israel, TI's activities are based on two acquisitions from the 1990s - Libit for $365 million and Butterfly for $50 million.
Libit's activities, in the cables for modems sector, were transferred to Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) in 2010, and TI's activities in Israel were mainly based on Butterfly's technological capabilities in short-range communication chips, mainly for Wi-Fi, Blutooth, and NFC. Apple's new development center has received some of the DNA of Butterfly but in all likelihood Apple will take the Ra'anana center into a different strategic direction.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 10, 2013
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