Both Filings Say August 13

Two SEC filings carry the same date. On August 13, 2026, the board of Kulicke and Soffa Industries appointed Raj Talluri president and chief executive officer, effective September 1. On August 13, 2026, Talluri resigned as president, chief executive officer and director of Enovix Corporation. The Enovix filing gives the reason in six words: "in order to pursue another opportunity."

It also carries the sentence boards attach when they want the market to stop looking. The resignation was "not the result of any disagreement with the Company" over operations, policies or practices.

Both filings reached EDGAR on August 17. The seat opens today.

The Seat Stood Open Nine Months

Kulicke and Soffa had been running without a permanent chief executive since the end of 2025. On October 28 that year the company disclosed that "due to health reasons" Fusen Chen would retire as president and chief executive, and leave the board, effective December 1. Lester Wong, the chief financial officer, took the interim seat without giving up the finance job. The disclosure set the terms of the search plainly: "The Board will conduct a search for a permanent successor among external and internal candidates."

From Chen's last day to Talluri's first: 274 days.

What happened inside that gap reframes the hire. K&S builds the machines that bond semiconductor dies into packages - wire bonders and advanced assembly systems, the iron at the back end of a chip line, a long way from the parts of the industry that get written about. In the fiscal third quarter ended July 4, 2026, the company reported net revenue of $330.4 million. The same quarter a year earlier produced $148.4 million. Diluted earnings per share went from a loss of six cents to a profit of $1.07. Gross margin reached 47.8 percent. Wong told investors "demand conditions continue to improve across all end markets" and guided the fourth quarter to approximately $375 million.

A chief financial officer holding two titles presided over a doubling. Talluri is not arriving to fix anything, which is the harder version of the job.

From Handset Silicon To Battery Cells

His career before Enovix was silicon and radios. Engineering and business leadership roles at Texas Instruments. Senior executive roles at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. Then Micron, where from March 2018 to December 2022 he ran the Mobile Business Unit as senior vice president and general manager - memory sold into handsets, the highest-volume and least forgiving market in the business. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from Andhra University, awarded in 1984, a master's from Anna University in 1986, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993.

In January 2023 he changed problems. Enovix makes lithium-ion cells with silicon anodes: a materials bet that has to be settled on a factory floor rather than in a design tool. His first quarterly release as its chief executive, on February 22, 2023, was written entirely in the vocabulary of manufacturing. "We saw significant improvements in yield, output and customer qualification in the fourth quarter."

Yield, output, qualification. Three and a half years later, those were still the words.

The Test He Did Not Finish

The Enovix record under Talluri is a record of a company getting closer.

In December 2024 the chief financial officer left and the company opened a search. Talluri measured what remained by its runway - a balance sheet with over $250 million of cash and "a clear financial runway to ramp the production of our high-energy battery" at the new plant in Penang, Malaysia. A January 2026 release put the year behind it on the record: preliminary unaudited results supporting "approximately 38% revenue growth for the company overall in 2025."

By the second quarter of 2026 the numbers were small and moving. Revenue of $9.0 million, up 21 percent year over year, a fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth; first-half revenue of $16.6 million, up 32 percent. Cash, equivalents and marketable securities of approximately $552.1 million. A drone, defense and industrial pipeline that grew to $183 million from $130 million in three months. Margin went the other way: GAAP gross margin of 14.4 percent, down 11.6 points year over year on product mix. The company lost 20 cents a share.

And the thing the whole enterprise had been built to reach was still in front of it. On August 12, 2026, Talluri told investors: "We have one final accelerated cycle-life test on the path to smartphone qualification, which we expect to complete this year." He framed the quarter as a threshold crossed - "Enovix is executing the transition from technology validation to commercial scale."

The next day he resigned.

What The New Seat Is Worth

Enovix's entire first half of 2026 - $16.6 million - is less than one week of revenue at the rate K&S guided to for its fourth quarter. He moves from a company still proving a cell to a company shipping tools into a build-out already running hot.

The pay discloses the expectation. Base salary of $750,000. Target bonus of 110 percent of it. A one-time new-hire equity award with a target value of $14.0 million, split evenly between restricted stock units and performance share units, the performance half vesting against relative total shareholder return over three years. An annual equity target of $6.0 million after that. Severance terms run to 24 months of salary continuation. That is not a package built to hold a good quarter in place. It is written against where the market puts K&S in 2029.

His own statement is the flattest document in the file. "I am honored to join K&S at such an exciting time in the Company's history." Then the single sentence that commits to a view: "K&S has built a unique portfolio of highly capable interconnect solutions and technical competencies which offer a higher level of value for our industry."

Built. The verb is past tense, and the work it describes is not his.

The fiscal fourth quarter ends October 3. Thirty-three of its days will belong to him, and the number attached to them is already guided. After that, the filings stop being about a transition and start being a record. Two of them shared a date in August. Everything that follows carries only one name.