Pasquale Pistorio

Leader of SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (now STMicroelectronics), Pistorio grew the company into one of the leading worldwide manufacturers of semiconductors. An Italian company director and ex-President of STMicroelectronics, he also served as a board member of Confindustria, and from April 17, 2007 until December 3, 2007, served as president of Telecom Italia. He graduated in 1963 in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin with a degree in Electronics. His early career was at Motorola, where he became the European Marketing Director in 1967.

From there his responsibility increased to Director of Worldwide Marketing, Vice President of Motorola Corporation, and Director General of the International Semiconductor Division, responsible for planning, production, and marketing worldwide excluding the USA. In the last two decades of his active career, he championed the cause of Europe's microelectronics industry, and his role was not one of pure theory but produced concrete and important industrial results.

In 1980 he returned to Italy to lead the SGS group, a microelectronics company that then went on to merge with the semiconductor arm of Thompson, a French electronics company, becoming SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (now known as STMicroelectronics). Under Pistorio's leadership, the company grew to become one of the leading worldwide manufacturers of semiconductors. In 2005 he stepped down as CEO and was named honorary President. Two years later he was nominated President of Telecom Italia.

He also served as Vice-President of Confindustria with responsibility for innovation and research. Confindustria is the Italian employers' federation, founded in 1910. It groups together more than 113,000 voluntary member companies, accounting for over 4 million individuals, and aims to help Italy's economic growth while assisting its members. Pistorio also sat as an independent consultant on the board of Fiat and of Chartered Semiconductor.

He was also involved with: Conseil Stratégique pour l'attractivité du pays auprès du Premier Ministre français; Internal Advisory Council Singapore Government; International Business Council of the World Economic Forum; World Business Council for Sustainable Development; Conseil Stratégique des Technologies de l'Information francese; and the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT).

As a firm believer in corporate social responsibility, he took a special interest in fighting the Digital Divide — the huge imbalance between those who have access to information technology and benefit from it and those who do not. As a member of the United Nations Information and Communications Task Force dedicated to bridging the Digital Divide, Pistorio helped develop proposals to attract corporate attention and commitment to this worldwide challenge.

He received many honors, among which are honorary degrees from the University of Genova, Malta, Pavia, Catania, Palermo, and Sannio. He was also awarded "il Premio Euno" by the Kiwanis Club of Enna on its 14th anniversary in 1999. Pistorio was awarded "Prix du Manager d'Entreprise" in the "Prix des Technologies de l'information," organized by Telecom Paris, a French telecommunications academy, in September 2003. He received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" from Reed Electronics Group as part of the inaugural European Electronics Industry Awards in October 2003, and in 2011 was awarded the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal.

In April 2005 he founded the Pistorio Foundation, a not-for-profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. Its scope is to supply aid in the fields of health, nutrition, and education, whether through direct aid, donations, or financial or humanitarian support for charities helping children in the most deprived areas of the world suffering from war, natural disasters, and other calamities.