History (1991): President and CEO George Scalise Leaves Maxtor

President and CEO George Scalise leaves Maxtor Corp., officially for “personal reasons.“

He grew up, professionally with the semiconductor industry and has been involved with disk drives since 1987. Before joining Maxtor, he held positions with AMD, Fairchild, Motorola and CBS Electronics.

Scalise has been replaced in his position for the moment by James McCoy, founder and chairman of the company.

Scalise’s departure arrived at the same time as the publishing of Maxtor’s 3FQ91 results, ended December 29 and that show a net loss of $2.96 million, down from net income of $1.6 million reported last quarter and from $5.5 million net income in 3FQ90.

And even if 3FQ91’s results include recognition of an estimated fourth quarter operating loss of $3.4 million on sales of model 8051, 40MB drive, which is being discontinued. In 3FQ91, revenues were $261.2 million, up 9% from the $239.6 million reported in 2091 and up 111% from the $123.9 million in 3FQ90.

Meanwhile, in June 1990, Maxtor acquired MiniScribe for $46 million and placed its operations separately under the Maxtor Colorado Company.

But on January 7, California and Colorado operations companies were merged.

Taroon C. Kamdar, previously president and COO of Maxtor Colorado, was named to head the new organization to assure the newly-created role of president and COO, disk drive operations.

In addition to the problems in reorganizing the two companies, a delay occurred in production of the Panther family of high capacity, 0.8 to 1.7GB, 5.25-inch drives plus a severe worldwide competition in 200 MB 3.5S-inch HDDs.

McCoy will now have to find someone to replace Scalise.

James Miller, SVP, WW sales, also left the company and was replaced by Gary Galusta.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠37, published on February 1991.