Top Executive At Intel-Owned Altera Retires Amid Stake Sale, IPO Plans

Shannon Poulin, the COO of Intel programmable chip business Altera, says he has retired from the company as Intel seeks to sell a stake in the independent subsidiary ahead of a planned initial public offering.

The COO of Intel programmable chip business Altera said he has retired from the company as the parent company seeks to sell a stake in the independent subsidiary ahead of a planned initial public offering.

Shannon Poulin, a 25-year Intel sales veteran who became COO of Altera a year ago, announced his departure in a LinkedIn post Monday and said he is “excited to think about the next chapter” after getting Altera started “once again down the path of stand-up and IPO.”

“The technology world is a collaborative ecosystem where no company can survive alone. I treasure the relationships that have been built with customers and partners who were doing incredible things using Intel/Altera products,” he wrote.

An Altera spokesperson confirmed to CRN that Poulin departed the company.

“We thank Shannon for his tremendous contributions over many years of service and leadership. He was a valued member of our team and we wish him well in his future endeavors,” the representative said in a statement.

Acquired by Intel for $16.7 billion in 2015, Altera designs FPGAs, short for field-programmable gate arrays, which consist of semiconductor chips that can be reprogrammed, unlike standard CPUs and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), for a variety of reasons, including advanced functionality.

Poulin had been Altera’s No. 2 executive since Intel announced its plan more than a year ago to spin off the business, previously known as the Programmable Solutions Group, into an independent subsidiary that reclaimed its original brand name. As stated in October 2023, Intel’s goal is to sell a stake in the business and then conduct an IPO for Altera by 2026.

Prior to becoming Altera’s COO, Poulin had served as corporate vice president and general manager of the Programmable Solutions Group for more than two years. Before then, he held a variety of sales, marketing and product roles, including as corporate vice president and general manager of global markets and partners.

In Intel’s third-quarter earnings report last Thursday, it said Altera’s revenue declined 44 percent year over year but increased 14 percent sequentially to $412 million on top of growing its net income to $9 million. The FPGA business has been increasing its revenue and profitability since the first quarter after it experienced a pronounced slowdown in demand in the previous year.

“With an increasingly competitive road map, the business is well positioned to show continued top- and bottom-line improvements,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger in the earnings call last week.

While Intel had been planning to use the proceeds of Altera’s stake sale and IPO to help fund Gelsinger’s expensive comeback plan, the need to generate extra cash gained a new sense of urgency when the semiconductor giant said in August that it would cut more than 15,000 jobs and $10 billion in costs in response to worsening financial conditions.

Sandra Rivera, who was named Altera’s CEO when the spin-off plan was announced, told CRN in September that Intel’s plan for Altera “has not changed,” denying a report that said the semiconductor giant was planning to float a proposal to sell the entirety of Altera.

“We are executing to the plan, which is not a sale of Altera, but rather it is selling a stake in the business, which has always been the plan, which we’ve communicated for now over a year, and for us to do the IPO in 2026. That’s the plan,” she said in the interview.

In mid-October, CNBC reported that Intel “is looking to sell at least a minority stake in its Altera unit in a transaction that would raise several billion dollars in cash” for the chipmaker and value the subsidiary at around $17 billion.

Gelsinger reaffirmed Intel’s plan for Altera in the earnings call last week.

“Consistent with what we have said previously, we remain focused on selling a stake in Altera on the path to its IPO in the coming years. To that end, we have begun discussions with potential investors and expect to conclude in early 2025,” he said.