David Reeder and the value of taking the long way home

David Reeder once chose a job partly because it put Arkansas within a day’s drive. By then, he had worked in Europe and Asia, managed semiconductor operations, and acquired the sort of résumé that makes geography look like an administrative detail. Geography, however, had become the point. The next opportunity needed to make sense on a family map.

That detail is useful when considering the executive who became president and chief executive of Entegris on August 18, 2025. A list of his employers can resemble a departure board: Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Cisco, Lexmark, GlobalFoundries, Chewy. Read as a personal story, it has a different rhythm. Technical work led to management. Management led across borders. Financial responsibility kept expanding into responsibility for the whole business.

Entegris brings those strands together. Its business involves advanced materials, filtration, purification, and the handling systems that semiconductor manufacturers depend on. Reeder arrives with experience on several sides of that relationship. He has worked around the making of chips, the financing of factories, and the operation of companies whose customers expect things to arrive and work. There is considerable scope for disappointment in all three.

A ranch, a scholarship, an evening classroom

Reeder grew up on a working ranch in Cedarville, in northwest Arkansas. He earned a full academic scholarship to the University of Arkansas and studied chemical engineering. Texas Instruments brought him to Dallas; Southern Methodist University supplied an MBA, earned through night study. A management program then helped send him overseas.

The itinerary included England, Kuala Lumpur, southern France, and Singapore. He met his wife in an English pub, established a factory in Malaysia, and managed Broadcom’s Asian operations from Singapore. These were working addresses, with a growing family along for the journey. Eventually, the pull of relatives back in Arkansas helped make a Lexington job attractive.

“It’s the cliche: I met her in a pub.”

David Reeder, recalling his time in England, 2015

The education matters independently of the travel. A chemical engineering degree and an MBA offer two ways into the same company: how a process works, and how the business pays for it. In Reeder’s case, both qualifications preceded a succession of jobs that required him to move between those questions. The combination would become a recurring feature of the assignments he received.

When the finance job comes with a factory

From 2007 to 2012, Reeder worked in manufacturing and operations management at Broadcom. He then became vice president and CFO of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Division, serving from 2012 to 2014. That sequence is worth pausing over. Operations came before some of the financial titles most readily associated with his name. His route into corporate finance already included practical responsibility for making a business function.

At Electronics for Imaging, where he became CFO in January 2014, the brief extended beyond accounting. It included information technology, real estate, security, treasury, tax, audit, and investor relations. A CFO title can conceal a small collection of other occupations. This one certainly did. The remit illustrates why treating Reeder’s later moves as purely financial appointments would miss part of his experience.

Lexmark appointed him CFO effective January 9, 2015. He was entering a business undergoing a change in direction, with printing and imaging sitting alongside ambitions in software and services. The assignment put his technical education beside the financial decisions of an established technology company. Before long, his job title changed again, and so did the ownership of the business around him.

The corner office, with an asterisk

On November 29, 2016, Lexmark announced the completion of its acquisition by an investor consortium led by Apex Technology and PAG Asia Capital. Shareholders were to receive $40.50 a share in cash. The same announcement named Reeder president and CEO, succeeding Paul Rooke. A change of ownership and a change of leadership arrived together.

It was a substantial promotion, although a short tenure. Reeder resigned in June 2017. The dates belong in the story: his time at Lexmark stretched from 2015 to 2017, while his service as chief executive occupied only the latter part of that period. Executive biographies can flatten such distinctions until every role seems to have lasted a comfortable number of years.

From 2017 to 2020, he was CEO of Tower Hill Insurance Group. Insurance makes an unexpected appearance in a career otherwise crowded with technology companies. It also establishes something straightforward about his later return to semiconductors: by then, he had already run businesses as well as their finance departments. The next company hired someone with both experiences.

A bell in New York, a business on three continents

GlobalFoundries announced Reeder’s appointment as CFO in July 2020, with an August start. An initial public offering was already part of the stated assignment. Tom Caulfield, its chief executive, welcomed an executive whose experience included corporate finance, operations, investor relations, and risk management. Reeder’s detour through insurance had ended with a return to the semiconductor industry.

The company listed on Nasdaq in October 2021, raising nearly $2.6 billion. Reeder oversaw the offering as CFO. The timing gave the transaction a wider resonance: chips were in short supply, and the capacity to manufacture them had become a subject far beyond the usual technology audience. A stock exchange ceremony made a conspicuously public moment out of an intensely industrial business.

His responsibilities at GlobalFoundries also covered operations, supply chain, procurement, and IT. Those functions connect the capital being raised with the factories expected to put it to work. Investors can inspect a presentation in an afternoon. A manufacturing organization has to keep answering for it afterward, across purchasing decisions, production schedules, and relationships with customers.

Chewy recruited him as CFO effective February 14, 2024. Its CEO, Sumit Singh, emphasized profitable growth and capital efficiency in announcing the hire. Pet supplies may seem far removed from semiconductor wafers, but the stated financial brief was recognizable. Reeder’s career had again crossed an industry boundary while retaining several of the same management questions.

Seventeen months to learn the company

In March 2024, while CFO at Chewy, Reeder joined the Entegris board. Bertrand Loy, then chairman and CEO, highlighted his background in leadership, risk management, finance, operations, and strategy. It was initially a director’s assignment. It would also give him a period inside the boardroom before the much larger executive appointment that followed.

Entegris announced its succession plan in May 2025. Loy would step down after 13 years as CEO, and Reeder would take over in August. The board considered internal and external candidates. Its subsequent account described a process lasting several years and a unanimous selection of Reeder. He had been a director for roughly seventeen months by the time he started.

Loy called him “an incisive thinker and a decisive leader.” That is a predecessor’s assessment, rather than a personality test, but it gives a concrete view of what the board believed it was hiring. The company also arranged a transition period with Loy as executive chair. Responsibility moved to Reeder with an experienced predecessor still available during the handover.

The small things now on his desk

In a 2026 interview, Reeder described customers’ priorities in practical terms: getting new production running, improving the proportion of usable chips, and maintaining dependable supplies. He pointed to work on trace-metal contamination in chemicals used for high-bandwidth memory. The example suits the company: a minute impurity can become a problem large enough to command executive attention.

His public emphasis is on working close to customers, both technically and geographically. He describes engagements beginning years before commercial production, while materials and processes are still being developed. That stretches the timetable of leadership. Some decisions being made under his watch concern products that will reach volume manufacturing well beyond the next quarterly call.

In May 2026, Entegris and JSR, Inpria’s parent company, announced a non-exclusive cross-licensing agreement involving metal oxide resist patents for extreme ultraviolet lithography. They also agreed to explore future collaboration on photoresist materials. The arrangement reaches into chemistry, filtration, and delivery systems. Its significance for Reeder’s assignment lies in how closely those pieces must work together.

His March 2026 shareholder letter set out another task: putting an expanded manufacturing base to work after a multiyear capital investment cycle. He described capacity intended to support more than $1 billion in incremental revenue with limited additional investment. That figure was an expectation about future capacity and growth, rather than revenue already earned. The distinction is central to the job.

The figures have started to move

For the second quarter of 2026, Entegris reported $883.2 million in sales, compared with $792.4 million a year earlier. GAAP net income rose to $93.6 million from $52.8 million. Reeder pointed to improving semiconductor demand, customer investment, and operational initiatives. The results give an early view of the business during his tenure; they reflect the work of the company and the market around it.

In May 2026, he also joined Celestica’s board, adding another connection to electronics manufacturing. His earlier Alphawave Semi directorship had ended in December 2025. The board work extends a career spent moving among different parts of technology production, with finance remaining one of its recurring languages.

The distance from Cedarville to semiconductor materials is considerable, even before counting the flights. Reeder’s career gives that distance a human scale: an evening degree, assignments overseas, a decision to come closer to family, a series of larger briefs. At Entegris, the work now comes down to what customers can manufacture reliably, and whether the business can turn years of investment into results. The long route has brought him to a job with very specific measurements.