Do You Remember Controversial Tom Mitchell?

An history of the worldwide hard disk drive industry couldn’t omit the name of David T. (Tom) Mitchell. He founded Seagate Technology (with Al Shugart, Doug Mahon, Finis Conner and Syed Iftikar) in November 1, 1978 where he served as president from 1983 to 1991, resigning under pressure of the board of directors. He is considered as a pioneer in the establishment of Asia as the pre-eminent manufacturing base for HDDs.

David T. (Tom) Mitchell
Founder, chairman and CEO of Fabrinet

We tried several times to make an interview with him but we didn’t succeed as he seems to hate journalists. Last time we saw him, he was married with beautiful girl from India. Her sister worked for a while in Paris for one of Mitchell’s company. We remember to call her once by phone but never saw her.

Why do we write about Tom today? Because his current firm Fabrinet Co., Ltd. is just trying to raise $31.8 million in an initial public offering.

The controversial Mitchell never tired of rubbing elbows in the foremost circles of the storage industry, first at Seagate and then at Conner Peripherals, before a disastrous spell at JTS. He served now as chairman and CEO of Fabrinet that he founded in 2000. The ex-marine, described by an analyst as the Darth Vader of the hard drive industry, is known to keep a grenade on his desk and made people work 365 days a year. We were told that one day, one of his salesman drives a car with Mitchell to meet a customer in UK. But he couldn’t find the way to reach the proper destination and was immediately fired.

Fabrinet is a contract electronics manufacturer that took off with the acquisition of a facility in Chokchai, Thailand let go by Seagate. More specifically, the plant in question produced head-stack assemblies, established by Seagate in 1997 and was employing 3,329 people in 1999. Guess who was Fabrinet’s main customer? Yes, Seagate. The Cayman Islands company is not anymore in the disk industry and totally involved into the manufacturing for OEMs of components for optical communications systems, mainly since the acquisition JDS Uniphase in 2005.

Now Fabrinet has four factories in Thailand and two other ones in Fuzhou, the People’s Republic of China, and New Jersey, USA, employing a total of 5,400 people, mostly in Thailand. Fabrinet said it has been profitable since inception. In the nine months ended March 31, it earned $31 million on revenue of $348 million, and $27.4 million and $359 million respectively in the same period a year earlier.

In 2009, Fabrinet already filed for a $250 million IPO, but pulled the deal due to unfavorable market conditions, and tried another one the same year for $150 million.

Several executives of Fabrinet are former colleagues of Tom Mitchell in HDDs. COO Dr. Harpal Gill served as senior VP of engineering for Maxtor from 2003 to 2005. Formerly, he was as VP of engineering for Read Rite, after being managing director of JTS in Chennai (Madras), India. He also held senior management positions with Seagate. Fabrinet’s executive VP for sales and marketing Nat Mani also worked for JTS. Another one, senior VP operations controller Toh-Seng (TS) Ng served formerly at Magnecomp Precision, Hitachi GST and Read-Rite.

What happens to the other founders of Seagate:

Al Shugart: died on December 12, 2006 in Monterey, CA of complications from heart surgery
Doug Mahon: don’t know
Finis Conner: current CEO of Millenniata
Syed Iftikar: no news since the bankruptcy of Castlewood Systems where he was founder (in 1997), president and CEO