Austria Microsystems

The story begins in 1981 as a joint venture between the American company AMI Semiconductor and the Austrian industrial group voestalpine AG, creating Austria Mikro Systeme (ams). The new company established its headquarters in a castle in Premstätten, Austria, and by 1983, it had opened its first wafer factory. The company focused on application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, finding early success in the automotive and industrial markets. In 1993, ams became the first semiconductor company in Europe to go public on the Vienna stock exchange. However, in 2000, it was taken private by shareholder Permira, which led to a name change to austriamicrosystems AG. A few years later, in 2004, the company returned to the public markets with an IPO on the Swiss Stock Exchange. A pivotal moment came in 2011 with the acquisition of Texas Advanced Optoelectronic Solutions (TAOS), a specialist in light sensor technologies. This acquisition sharpened the company's focus, and in 2012, the company rebranded simply to ams. The true game-changer, however, was the ambitious acquisition of the much larger German lighting and photonics giant, OSRAM, a company with over 110 years of history. After a bidding war, ams secured a majority stake in 2020 for approximately €2.7 billion, and the combined entity became ams OSRAM, a global leader in sensor solutions and photonics.