Nine Months, Then One Day

The offer letter is dated August 12, 2026. It is addressed to a house on Ainsworth Drive in Los Altos, California, and it offers Dr. Raj Talluri, president and chief executive of Enovix Corporation, those same two titles at Kulicke and Soffa Industries. One line in it resets the geography of his working life: "Your primary work location will be in Singapore."

That same August 12, Enovix filed its second-quarter results. The release quoted Talluri, as president and chief executive, describing "momentum across all three of our target markets" in the quarter just closed.

The next day he resigned.

The Week Everything Moved

The sequence sits in two sets of filings, and it is tight. On August 13 the Kulicke & Soffa board appointed Talluri president and chief executive effective September 1, and elected him a director effective August 17. On that same August 13 he resigned from Enovix - the chief executive's job, the president's job and the board seat - "in order to pursue another opportunity." On August 14 the Enovix board accepted, elevated chairman T.J. Rodgers to executive chairman, and gave the interim chief executive's job to Ryan Benton, the finance chief.

Investors learned all of it on Monday, August 17. Enovix shares fell 16 percent.

The Enovix filing is precise about what did not happen. The resignation, it records, "was not the result of any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to operations, policies, or practices." That is language written by lawyers, and it answers a question nobody was asking. The one worth asking is what he was walking toward.

Nine Months Without A Chief

A vacancy, and an old one. On October 28, 2025, Kulicke & Soffa disclosed that "due to health reasons, Dr. Fusen Chen has informed the Company's Board of Directors" that he would retire as president and chief executive effective December 1. The board handed the job, on an interim basis, to Lester Wong, who was already executive vice president and chief financial officer and who kept those titles as well. Chen stayed on as an adviser to the board at $75,000 a month.

Nine months later Wong was still carrying both roles. Under the arrangement disclosed on August 17 he keeps the finance seat and gives back the other one.

What it cost to end that interregnum is itemized in the filing: a base salary of $750,000; an annual incentive target of 110 percent of base, payable between zero and 200 percent of target; and a one-time new-hire equity award with a target value of $14 million, split evenly between restricted stock units and performance share units that vest against the company's total shareholder return measured relative to a peer group. The initial annual equity award target is a further $6 million.

Kulicke & Soffa has been building semiconductor assembly equipment since 1951. Its next chief executive will run it from Singapore.

The Test He Did Not Finish

What Talluri leaves behind at Enovix is real, and it is small. Second-quarter 2026 revenue of $9.0 million, up 21 percent year over year and 19 percent sequentially, at the high end of guidance - a fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, and a seventh consecutive quarter of positive gross profit. A drone, defense and industrial pipeline that had swelled to $183 million from $130 million three months earlier. Roughly $552.1 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.

And the one thing the entire investment case rested on, unfinished. The argument Enovix made to shareholders was a silicon-anode battery qualified into a flagship smartphone. In his final quarterly release Talluri reported that the lead customer had confirmed passing more than 1,000 cycles, then added: "We have one final accelerated cycle-life test on the path to smartphone qualification, which we expect to complete this year."

He had been reporting progress on that qualification for a long time. February 2023, his first set of results as chief executive: "We saw significant improvements in yield, output and customer qualification in the fourth quarter." November 2025: "our marquee customer programs are moving towards commercial launch". Then August 2026, the sign-off on his last quarter: "Enovix is executing the transition from technology validation to commercial scale."

Three and a half years in the chair, and the qualification was still one test away when he left it. That test is now scheduled to finish under someone else's name.

Rodgers put the company's position plainly: "This is a CEO transition, not a strategy transition." The shares moved 16 percent against him the same day.

What He Ran Before

Talluri came to Enovix in January 2023 from Micron Technology, where he had been senior vice president and general manager of the Mobile Business Unit from March 2018 to December 2022 - the memory maker's phone business, through years when smartphone silicon stopped growing and started consolidating. Before Micron, senior executive roles at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. Before that, engineering and business leadership roles at Texas Instruments. He took a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993, a master's in engineering from Anna University in 1986, and a bachelor's from Andhra University in 1984.

It is a chip career, not a battery career. Enovix was the detour. Kulicke & Soffa - the bonders, the dispensers, the machinery that turns finished silicon into packaged parts - is a return to the industry he spent three decades inside.

The Floor He Inherits

He starts September 1, and the $14 million grant is made that day. The Kulicke & Soffa board said it weighed his record as an officer of several semiconductor companies and the breadth of his knowledge of the industry - a director's qualification written for a man who has never before run a company that sells machines rather than parts.

His own statement on the appointment ran to the conventional. "I am honored to join K&S at such an exciting time in the Company's history." The rest of it promised to extend the portfolio and to work with what he called a diverse and talented global workforce.

Neither release carries a word from Talluri about the company he was leaving. Two boards announced the same man on the same morning; only one of them let him speak.

The offer letter closes out the small print. It fixes his hours at half past eight to half past five, Mondays to Fridays, then allows that he may work whatever additional time the job demands. It is dated the day before he quit.