Cree Decides Light Speed Is Too Slow, Goes Right To Wolfspeed For Power & RF Spinoff

Cree(CREE), a leader in LED lighting also has a North Carolina-based Power & RF business which has no overlap with the core business. In May, the company announced that it planned an IPO of the Power & RF business, and that it had filed with the SEC towards that goal.  The company plans to sell a minority stake and retain the rest for the time being. There are no plans, as of yet, to distribute shares to Cree shareholders.

This week, Cree announced a name for the new company: Wolfspeed. No, this is not what comes after ludicrous speed.

Rather it has a deep, business related meaning:

Frank Plastina, will be CEO of the new company; he has been a longtime Cree board member and was former CEO of Tekelec.

He says the new name helps ease the transition for Cree’s faithful. “They have an identity and obviously a loyalty to Cree and have worked for Cree for a long time, so taking the identity that takes the best of what Cree has and adding to it is part of the challenge,” he says.

Just a word of warning to the new company- your name, unfortunately, can be read as WolfsPeed, perhaps leading to confusion with this clip.

 

Disclosure: The author has no position in any stock mentioned