Jean-Marc Chéry

"I believe you manage people well when you love them; empathy is essential."

— Jean-Marc Chéry

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Overview

Jean-Marc Chéry
Born	(1960-07-05) 5 July 1960 Orléans, France
Citizenship	France
Education	Engineering
Alma mater	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers (ENSAM)
Occupation(s)	Engineer; business executive
Employer	STMicroelectronics
Known for	Leadership of STMicroelectronics and role in the European semiconductor industry
Title	President and Chief Executive Officer
Term	2018–present
Predecessor	Carlo Bozotti
Board member of	STMicroelectronics; Legrand; Capgemini; Global Semiconductor Alliance
Children	Three daughters
Awards	Knight of the Legion of Honor (2019); Industrialist of the Year 2022 (Usine Nouvelle)

🧭 Jean-Marc Chéry (born 5 July 1960) is a French engineer and business executive who has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of STMicroelectronics, a Franco-Italian semiconductor manufacturer, since 31 May 2018. Trained as a mechanical and industrial engineer at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers (ENSAM), he joined Thomson Semiconducteurs in 1986 and has spent his entire subsequent career inside the group that became STMicroelectronics, progressing through manufacturing, technology and operational roles before taking the top job. Beyond his executive responsibilities at ST, Chéry has been active in industry bodies and on corporate boards, serving as chair of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and as a director of Legrand and Capgemini, and previously leading European associations such as AENEAS and the European Semiconductor Industry Association (ESIA).

📈 Career arc. Over four decades Chéry has been closely associated with the evolution of STMicroelectronics from a European commodity chipmaker into a diversified supplier of automotive, industrial and sensor technologies. Having helped to design and execute a major restructuring in the early 2010s after the failure of the ST-Ericsson joint venture, he was seen internally as one of the architects of the company’s turnaround and subsequent growth in imaging sensors and microcontrollers. As Chief Executive Officer he has pursued a strategy centred on automotive and industrial semiconductors, backed by large investments in European fabrication plants, but he has also faced criticism as ST’s financial performance weakened sharply in 2024–2025 and the group appeared under-exposed to the boom in artificial-intelligence-related chips.

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Early life and education

👶 Origins. Chéry was born on 5 July 1960 in Orléans, in central France, into a modest family with close ties to technology; his father worked as a maintenance technician on large mainframe computers, which exposed him early to the world of machines and electronics. This environment, combining hands-on technical work and the routines of industrial life, later informed his own description of himself as an engineer at heart rather than a financier or professional manager.

🎓 Engineering education. After secondary schooling in Orléans, Chéry moved to Paris to study at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers (ENSAM), one of France’s traditional grandes écoles specialising in mechanical and industrial engineering. He graduated in 1983 with an engineering degree and has credited ENSAM’s emphasis on workshop practice, human factors in industry and collective discipline with shaping the “Gadzarts” mindset—named after the school’s alumni—that he carried into his professional life, likening its demands to the mental training of competitive sport.

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Career

🧰 Early career. Chéry began his professional career in 1983 at the French engineering group Matra, where he worked in the mechanical testing department for two years. The position, far from the cutting edge of electronics, nonetheless provided experience in industrial quality and reliability that he would later apply to semiconductor manufacturing. In 1986 he left Matra to join Thomson Semiconducteurs, then a French state-backed chipmaker that would later merge into STMicroelectronics, thereby committing his career to the nascent European semiconductor sector.

🏭 Manufacturing leadership. Within a year of joining Thomson Semiconducteurs, the 27-year-old Chéry was appointed to run a wafer fabrication plant in Tours, France, where silicon wafers for integrated circuits were produced. He managed the Tours facility from 1987 to 2001 and was then promoted to director of ST’s Rousset plant in Provence from 2001 to 2005, gaining a reputation as a pragmatic, operations-focused manager able to improve yields and streamline production. In 2005 he led a group-wide restructuring of 150-millimetre (6-inch) wafer production, closing and consolidating lines as the company migrated to more advanced processes, and in 2006 he moved to Singapore to head ST’s front-end manufacturing activities in the Asia-Pacific region, extending his experience to international, multicultural teams.

💡 Technology strategy. In 2008 Chéry joined the top management ranks when he was promoted to Chief Technology Officer of STMicroelectronics, with subsequent responsibility for group-wide Manufacturing and Quality from 2011 and the Digital Products division from 2012. This period coincided with the wind-down of ST-Ericsson, the mobile-chip joint venture with Ericsson that had failed to capitalise on the smartphone boom, and the company’s need to reset its strategy. Working closely with then-chief executive Carlo Bozotti, Chéry helped design a major restructuring plan in 2012 that shifted ST’s focus away from commoditised mobile platforms and towards differentiated products such as microcontrollers and sensors. One of his most noted contributions was to push for a repositioning of ST’s imaging business from low-margin camera modules into advanced imaging sensors, including time-of-flight and structured-light devices used in mobile phones and automotive applications, which drew on close collaboration with a large, unnamed customer later identified in the trade press as Apple.

🧑‍💼 Ascent to CEO. Chéry’s experience across manufacturing, R&D, customer service and marketing made him a candidate for more general management roles, and in 2014 he was appointed Chief Operating Officer with responsibility for global technology and manufacturing operations. In July 2017 he became Deputy Chief Executive Officer with a broadened remit that included sales and marketing worldwide, a position widely interpreted as preparing him to succeed Bozotti. On 31 May 2018 he formally took over as President and CEO of STMicroelectronics, becoming the first French national to exercise sole operational control of the binational group, while also chairing its Managing Board and Executive Committee.

🌍 Strategic priorities. As Chief Executive Officer, Chéry has focused ST’s strategy on markets where the company has long-standing strengths: automotive and industrial semiconductors, power electronics, sensors and microcontrollers. He endorsed an ambitious medium-term revenue objective of around US$20 billion and committed to heavy capital expenditure, including a multi-billion-euro project to expand a leading-edge fabrication complex in Crolles in south-eastern France, supported by substantial French and Italian public subsidies as part of Europe’s effort to reinforce its semiconductor base. At the same time, he promoted a “China for China” industrial strategy—building capacity inside China to serve Chinese demand—and publicly argued that Europe should “defend globalization”, reflecting his belief that open global supply chains remain essential for the industry’s competitiveness.

📉 Downturn and performance. STMicroelectronics benefited strongly from the global semiconductor boom of 2020–2021, with robust demand in automotive and industrial markets, but under Chéry the group later became vulnerable to a cyclical reversal. By 2022–2023 oversupply in automotive chips and a slowdown in electric-vehicle sales contributed to a sharp deterioration in results, while ST’s portfolio left it less exposed than some competitors to fast-growing artificial-intelligence and data-centre applications. In 2024 the company’s revenue fell by more than 20 per cent and net profit dropped by nearly 90 per cent year-on-year in early 2025, a steeper decline than that experienced by several European peers, and the share price retreated accordingly, yielding a negative total shareholder return over the preceding three-year period. The original US$20-billion revenue target was pushed back to 2030, signalling that the growth trajectory envisaged when Chéry became CEO would take longer than initially planned.

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Financials, roles and recognition

💶 Compensation and ownership. As chief executive of STMicroelectronics, Chéry receives a remuneration package that places him among the better-paid leaders of European semiconductor companies of comparable size. Analysis of public disclosures for the 2024 financial year indicates total compensation of roughly US$9.5 million (about €8.5 million), up around 30 per cent year-on-year, with a base salary near US$1.2 million and the remainder consisting of variable bonuses and equity-based awards. Commentators have noted that this exceeds median pay levels for peer-group CEOs and that Chéry’s personal shareholding in ST remains small—on the order of a few million euros in stock—so that the bulk of his potential wealth from the company comes from incentive plans rather than from a large ownership stake. These figures have occasionally been criticised by segments of the shareholder base, particularly in light of the downturn in earnings and share performance since 2024, and they have been discussed at annual general meetings as part of broader debates over governance and strategic direction.

🏅 Industry roles and honors. In addition to his executive post at ST, Chéry has occupied a number of external governance and advocacy roles within the electronics industry. He chairs the Board of Directors of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and sits on the boards of Legrand and Capgemini, expanding his influence beyond the chip sector into electrical equipment and IT services. He has also held leadership positions in European collaborative bodies, including serving as President of AENEAS, which promotes micro- and nanoelectronics research, and heading the European Semiconductor Industry Association between 2019 and 2021. In 2019 the French authorities appointed him a Knight of the Legion of Honor, one of the country’s principal civil distinctions, and the trade publication Usine Nouvelle later designated him “Industrialist of the Year 2022” for his role in guiding ST through the pandemic-era supply-chain crisis and capacity expansion.

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Personal life and leadership style

🏡 Family and persona. Despite leading a company with tens of thousands of employees, Chéry maintains a relatively discreet personal profile. Public information indicates that he is married and has three daughters, but he keeps his family out of the spotlight and rarely discusses his private life in detail. Profiles in French alumni publications have portrayed him as “un Gadzarts au mental de sportif”, an engineer with an athlete’s mindset, and have emphasised his affinity for endurance activities such as cycling and hiking, which align with a self-image based on perseverance, discipline and incremental progress rather than display or celebrity.

🧊 Leadership style. Accounts from colleagues and journalists describe Chéry as a soft-spoken, fact-driven manager more comfortable on the factory floor or in technical reviews than on conference stages. Interviews portray him as methodical and demanding on execution, with an attention to detail rooted in his long experience of running wafer fabrication plants, but not prone to public displays of temper. During the downturn of 2024–2025 he adopted a calm rhetorical posture, telling investors that a temporary “storm” did not justify abandoning the company’s strategic course, and his demeanour at shareholder meetings was widely noted as restrained even in the face of sharp questioning about performance, layoffs and investment choices.

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Controversies and challenges

⚖️ Shareholder litigation. The sharp deterioration in STMicroelectronics’ results in 2024 triggered not only market criticism but also legal action directed at Chéry and other executives. After the company cut its full-year revenue guidance from about US$17 billion to US$13 billion as orders weakened, and its stock price fell by more than half, a group of investors in the United States filed a class-action lawsuit in New York alleging that the company’s leadership had misled the market about the state of the automotive business and questioning certain share transactions executed before the revised forecasts were announced. Chéry and Chief Financial Officer Lorenzo Grandi have rejected the allegations, and early judicial decisions have indicated that the plaintiffs face a high evidentiary bar, but the proceedings have strained relations with some parts of the investor community and underscored the scrutiny directed at the company’s communications during the downturn.

🇪🇺 Franco-Italian governance. STMicroelectronics has an unusual ownership structure in which the French and Italian states each hold substantial stakes through a common holding company, reflecting the group’s binational origins. In 2023 this arrangement became the backdrop for a public dispute over Chéry’s continuation in office when the Italian government initially opposed renewing his mandate for a third term, amid concerns that recent investment decisions—such as the prioritisation of projects in Crolles, France, over expansions in Catania, Italy—tilted the balance too far towards France. The episode led to tense negotiations between Paris and Rome and to reports of a rare cross-border split over the leadership of a major industrial group, but after French support and board deliberations, Chéry was reappointed and his term extended to 2027. In later comments he accepted that criticism of strategic choices is part of the role but stressed that challenges should not impugn an executive’s integrity, signalling that he was prepared to defend his reputation robustly when he judged that line to have been crossed.

👥 Layoffs and public subsidies. Another source of controversy under Chéry’s leadership has been the tension between large state aid packages and workforce reductions. In early 2025 STMicroelectronics announced plans to cut about 2,800 positions worldwide—roughly 5 per cent of its staff—through voluntary departures, including around 1,000 jobs in both France and Italy, as part of a wider effort to adjust costs to weaker demand. Because the announcement followed significant commitments of French and Italian public funds to subsidise ST’s new fabrication plants, it drew criticism from trade unions and political figures, some of whom argued that the company was benefiting from taxpayer support while shedding jobs and paying limited tax in France. Chéry defended the programme as a necessary, negotiated measure to safeguard the company’s long-term competitiveness and insisted that the voluntary-departure framework respected social obligations, but the episode nonetheless fuelled debate over the social responsibilities of strategically important, publicly supported industrial groups in Europe.

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Legacy and assessment

🔮 Legacy and outlook. Assessments of Chéry’s tenure as head of STMicroelectronics emphasise both continuity and tension between operational strength and strategic positioning. Supporters highlight his deep familiarity with the company’s manufacturing base, his role in the post-2012 restructuring and imaging strategy that helped restore growth, and his ability to maintain European investment in advanced chipmaking at a time of global competition for capacity. Critics, by contrast, point to the company’s heavy exposure to cyclical automotive markets, its relatively modest presence in data-centre and artificial-intelligence processors, and the sharp reversal in profits and shareholder returns after 2023 as signs that ST’s strategy under his leadership has not fully adapted to shifting industry dynamics. As he continues in office towards the scheduled end of his term in 2027, Chéry faces the dual challenge of steering ST through a difficult phase of the semiconductor cycle and repositioning the company for emerging technologies, while navigating the expectations of governments, investors, employees and broader European industrial policy.

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