Quality

For us, product responsibility also includes product and process quality, which is one of the most fundamental responsibilities we have to our customers. ST as a company, including all of its sites and organizations, is fully certified to the ISO TS 16949 standard, which was originally introduced in response to the automotive industry's need to ensure superior quality systems beyond the traditional ISO 9001 standard. Certification to this standard at company level means that all of our company processes and management systems are formally certified throughout the organization, not just at local level. See Quality in Everything We Do for more on this.

The chart below shows 2005 data for three of our performance indicators for quality: the number of customer complaints, the time it takes us to process failure analysis, and the number of customer returns of products. These results show consistent improvement throughout the year.

STPR2, STPR3, STPR4: Quality
	Q4'04	Q1'05	Q2'05	Q3'05	Q4'05
Customer complaints	100	101.9	99.1	88.9	86.2
Cycle time to process failure analysis	100	98.0	91.0	80.0	72.7
Customer returns	100	32.0	49.8	64.1	41.1