Ashod Kalfayan, former Market Research director of Texas Instrument’s UK subsidiary, has died at the age of 92.
He began his 44-year career with TI as a Marketing Assistant in 1958, at the Bedford plant. Duties included the preparation of data sheets and technical bulletins. His experience as a student as features editor of Oxford University’s newspaper, Cherwell, may have come in handy as the job advert said the position ‘demanded the ability to write lucidly’. Also, in a comment that proved all too prophetically true in the coming years about the then-nascent semi-conductor industry, TI’s recruiters said the post required ‘the drive to keep abreast of a rapidly progressing science.’
Equally ahead of its time, Texas Instruments made it clear: ‘The company makes no distinction between men and women applicants having an equivalent academic qualification and experience’.
When Ashod joined TI, the firm had an annual turnover of $60million – up from $2.25million in 1946, its first year.
The UK subsidiary was newly formed, manufacturing silicon transistors and rectifiers on a 35-acre site and planned to expand very quickly. Ashod Kalfayan was in the vanguard of that fast, upward trajectory.
It says much about how very far the world has travelled since then that, in 1958, TI executives were worried about sales of transistors etc in view of the fact that they reckoned the price of TV sets was too high for most ordinary people and that the receivers were suffering many ‘frequency response problems’.
At the time, the UK MD was Dudley Saward, who had been engaged on radar research and development for the UK’s Royal Air Force and was a Group Captain in Bomber Command serving under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris.
Ashod swiftly rose to become Marketing Research director through the 1970s and 1980s – working for long periods in Dallas, and in TI’s plants in Nice in France, and Rieti in Italy. He believed he was on the fast track to promotion up the US management ladder if he had agreed to move to Dallas – but felt duty-bound to stay in the UK in the best interests of his wife and young son.
As a man always ahead of his time, he was one of the few, lone pioneers of Western investment in China – having spent time in the fledgling Communist economic super-state where TI had sent him to recce the possible advantages of the firm launching a major investment programme. Ashod’s huge excitement about the potential was not initially shared in Dallas. But over the years, his prescience and optimism were, indeed, adopted and richly exploited.
After retiring from TI in 1991, he continued to do much work for the company as a freelance. Typical of his benevolent nature, he gave his £500 retirement gift (the equivalent of £1,000 today) to the international aid charity Oxfam.
And throughout his eighties, he kept fully up-to-date with the electronics industry, writing a daily newsletter for subscribers in the US and across the world on developments in the fibre optics industry for Optical Keyhole. At the time of his death, in February 2023, he was working on the final module toward completion of an Open University BA (Honours) degree in International Studies, which was awarded to him posthumously.
Ashod Kalfayan – a Texas Instruments loyalist – 1930 to 2023.