Fairchild Semiconductor Strategy Fuels Market Share Gains and Power Leadership Position

Business Wire, May 2, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 2, 2001

Company Strengthens Worldwide Market Position Through Strategic

Acquisitions and New Product Development

CEO Kirk Pond Cites Strategies to Maintain Dominance Supplying

High Performance Semiconductors Targeted at Multiple End Markets

Fairchild Semiconductor International (NYSE: FCS) continues to increase its market share worldwide, outpacing many competitors in such key industry sectors as discrete, analog and logic. This is according to data made available by global research firm Gartner. Research also verifies the company is outpacing overall segment growth rates in power MOSFETs, logic, and analog.

Fairchild Chairman, President and CEO Kirk Pond discussed these findings during his presentation at the Merrill Lynch Hardware Technology Conference, held today in New York City. Compared to 1999 results, Fairchild's market share gains in 2000 resulted in:

Fairchild becoming the leading global supplier of broadbased power components, which is a combination of power management ICs and power transistors as reported by Venture Development and Gartner;

Attained additional leading power positions including:

--No. 2 in the $3 billion Power MOSFET market;

--No. 1 in the less than 200V MOSFET segment;

--Reached the top 3 in the non-ECL $3.5 billion Standard Logic market; and

--Reached the top 5 in the $7 billion Power Discrete market and in the $5.2 billion Analog Power management market.

"These positions are particularly notable when you consider that when we founded Fairchild Semiconductor four years ago, we had only a limited power portfolio and no analog business at all," said Pond.

Pond also provided insights into the company's corporate and product strategies for maintaining these share gains while navigating the current semiconductor industry business cycle. "We will continue to execute our long term growth strategy through acquisition and developing new products that enable multiple end market applications," Pond said. "During this challenging economic environment, we have taken prudent, proactive measures to maintain vigorous cost controls without negatively affecting our R&D efforts, our ability to capture new design wins, or our overall focus on power market segments. Fairchild benefits from our ability to shift our focus rapidly from markets experiencing reduced demand to healthier markets, as we did in the first quarter by increasing sales into industrial and consumer segments. This past quarter, we introduced more than 90 new products - with more than 65% of those addressing power applications for our $1 billion power products business. We remain committed to winning business away from competitors in our quest to attain a 10% market share in the projected 2002, $60 billion multi-market semiconductor industry.

"We've been very successful in identifying organizations for strategic acquisition, and doing so has fueled Fairchild's ability to grow revenue and market share," Pond stated. "We'll continue to leverage acquisitions worldwide as we integrate manufacturing, engineering and operations. These efforts are paying off in terms of increased sales of power device products, major new design wins and product innovations that have resulted in new products now representing approximately one-third of our total trade sales."

Fairchild Semiconductor International (NYSE:FCS) is a leading global supplier of high performance products for multiple end markets. With a focus on developing leading edge power and interface solutions to enable the electronics of today and tomorrow, Fairchild's components are used in computing, communications, consumer, industrial, automotive and aerospace applications. Fairchild's 11,500 employees design, manufacture and market power, analog & mixed signal, interface, logic, and optoelectronics products from its headquarters in South Portland, Maine, USA and numerous locations around the world. Please contact us on the web at www.fairchildsemi.com.

Special Note on Forward Looking Statements:

Some statements in this news release are forward-looking statements that are based on management's assumptions and expectations and that involve risk and uncertainty. Forward-looking statements usually, but do not always, contain forward-looking terminology such as "we believe," "we expect," or "we anticipate," or refer to management's expectations about Fairchild's future performance. Many factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements. Among these factors are the following: changes in overall economic conditions; changes in demand for our products; changes in inventories at our customers and distributors; technological and product development risks; availability of manufacturing capacity; availability of raw materials; competitors' actions; loss of key customers; order cancellations or reduced bookings; changes in manufacturing yields or output; and significant litigation. Other risk factors are listed in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2000 (see the Risk Factors subsection of the Business section), available at the Investor Relations section of Fairchild Semiconductor's web site at investor.fairchildsemi.com or the Securities and Exchange Commission's web site at www.sec.gov.