Ralph Quinsey will be chairman. The deal was projected to close in the second half of the year, after which the companies will execute a one-for-four reverse stock split resulting in 145 million shares outstanding. On January 2, 2015, RFMD and Triquint jointly announced that they had completed their merger of equals to form Qorvo (NASDAQ: QRVO), and that Qorvo would start trading on the NASDAQ Global Stock Market starting from that day. Markets and competitors GaAs-based RFICs While the foundry model has come to prominence for the manufacture of CMOS logic integrated circuits, the manufacture of GaAs ICs has remained largely in the hands of vertically integrated companies like RFMD who both design the IC and manufacture it at their own fabrication facilities using proprietary process technology. This puts such companies at risk of underutilization of their manufacturing capacity when demand falls, which has frequently affected RFMD and impacted its profitability. Indeed, in recent times RFMD has started offering foundry services to manufacture GaAs-based products designed by third parties. The largest independent GaAs foundry competitor, Taiwan-based WIN Semiconductor, has seen mixed results. Vertically integrated competitors in the market for GaAs-based RFICs for wireless applications such as mobile phones, wireless infrastructure and wireless LAN include Skyworks Solutions, Avago, ANADIGICS, Murata and TriQuint Semiconductor, with which RFMD has signed a merger agreement. Despite the fact that the wireless GaAs device market has continued to grow in recent years, RFMD has seen mixed results. Competitors Skyworks and Avago have seen their GaAs revenues increase consistently, while RFMD experienced lower sales in 2011 and 2012 and lost market share. RFMD's GaAs device market share declined from 20% in 2008 (when it was #1) to 12.4% in 2011 and further declined in 2012 before a recovery in 2013/2014. For Q2 2014, RFMD reported strong sequential growth, reaching record quarterly revenue of US$316 million and improved profitability, while forecasting further growth for Q3 2014. RFMD's Polaris chipsets, sold from 2004 to 2011, were aligned with certain established but declining baseband architectures, including Freescale and essentially competed with RF transceiver solutions from growing mobile phone baseband/application processor companies Qualcomm and MediaTek, which were quickly becoming dominant and used their own RF transceiver solutions as part of their reference designs alongside the baseband/application processor, with the front-end/PA component sockets remaining open to GaAs chip manufacturers. The subsequent success of companies such as Skyworks, TriQuint and Avago in