YOKOHAMA, Japan--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan 5, 2026--
Macnica Inc. today announced the promotion of Sebastien Dignard to chief executive officer of the company’s Atlantic region. In this role, Dignard will lead Macnica’s business across North America, Europe and South America, accelerating the company’s component-to-solutions strategy and strengthening cross-regional collaboration to deliver long-term value for customers and partners across key verticals.
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Dignard previously served as president of Macnica Americas for two years where he led the organization through a period of growth and transformation across semiconductors, imaging, networking and advanced technologies.
Under his leadership, the company shifted from a focus on individual components to value-driven solutions, ecosystem partnerships and customer-centric execution across key vertical markets. Dignard will continue to lead the North American operations while aligning Macnica’s expertise, innovation and execution across the broader Atlantic region.
“What we have been building together over the past two years matters deeply to me,” Dignard said. “Our progress as a solutions-led organization, our momentum across key verticals and the culture we have built will continue to be foundational as we expand collaboration across the Atlantic region.”
Dignard said his expanded role will allow him to further connect solutions, colleagues and partners across Europe and South America, strengthening collaboration and sharing knowledge across regions.
“Many of the challenges and opportunities we see across our key verticals in North America are mirrored across the Atlantic, and together we can accelerate our component-to-solutions strategy in a more unified and impactful way by leveraging our subject matter expertise to benefit both customers and partners,” he said.
“Over the course of his career and through his contributions over the past two years at Macnica Americas, Sebastien has successfully led organizations through periods of growth and change, building strong teams, trusted partner ecosystems and differentiated solution strategies,” said Akinobu Miyoshi, co-CEO of Macnica. “As Macnica continues to invest in North America and the Atlantic region, his leadership, supported by our headquarters and teams across Asia, will be instrumental in scaling that momentum across the Americas and Europe, aligning regional execution with our global vision and long-term growth objectives.”
About Macnica
Macnica is a service and solutions company specializing in advanced technologies, with a core focus on semiconductors and cybersecurity. With operations in 91 locations across 28 countries and regions, the company leverages its global network and more than 50 years of technical expertise to discover, propose and implement cutting-edge technologies, including AI, IoT and autonomous driving.
For more information, visit www.macnica.co.jp.
Sebastien Dignard, CEO, Macnica Atlantic Region
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — He has been in exile for nearly 50 years. His father, Iran’s shah, was so widely hated that millions took to the streets in 1979, forcing him from power. Nevertheless, Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is trying to position himself as a player in his country’s future.
Pahlavi successfully spurred protesters onto the streets Thursday night in a massive escalation of the protests sweeping Iran. Initially sparked by the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, the demonstrations have become a serious challenge to its theocracy, battered by years of nationwide protests and a 12-day war in June launched by Israel that saw the U.S. bomb nuclear enrichment sites.
What is unknown is how much real support the 65-year-old Pahlavi, who is in exile in the U.S., has in his homeland. Do protesters want a return of the Peacock Throne, as his father’s reign was known? Or are the protesters just looking for anything that is not Iran’s Shiite theocracy?
Pahlavi issued calls, rebroadcast by Farsi-language satellite news channels and websites abroad, for Iranians to return to the streets Friday night, which they did. He has called for further demonstrations this weekend.
“Over the past decade, Iran’s protest movement and dissident community have been increasingly nationalist in tone and tenor,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which faces sanctions from Tehran.
“The more the Islamic Republic has failed, the more it has emboldened its antithesis," Taleblu said. "The success of the crown prince and his team has been in drawing a sharp contrast between the normalcy of what was and the promise of what could be, versus the nightmare and present predicament that is the reality for so many Iranians.”
Pahlavi’s profile rose again during U.S. President Donald Trump's first term. Still, Trump and other world leaders have been hesitant to embrace him, given the many cautionary tales in the Middle East and elsewhere of Western governments putting their faith in exiles long estranged from their homelands.
Iranian state media, which for years mocked Pahlavi as being out of touch and corrupt, blamed “monarchist terrorist elements” for the demonstrations Thursday night during which vehicles were burned and police kiosks attacked.
Born Oct. 31, 1960, Pahlavi lived in a gilded world of luxury as the crown prince to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Mohammed Reza had inherited the throne from his own father, an army officer who seized power with support from the British. Mohammed Reza’s rule was cemented by a 1953 CIA-backed coup, and he cooperated closely with the Americans, who sold the autocratic ruler billions of dollars of weapons and spied on the Soviet Union from Iran.
The young Pahlavi was schooled at the eponymous Reza Pahlavi School, set up within the walls of Niavaran Palace in northern Tehran. A biographer of his father noted the crown prince once played rock music in the palace during a New Year’s Eve visit to Tehran by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
But the fall of the Peacock Throne loomed.
While successfully riding rising oil prices in the 1970s, deep economic inequality set in during the shah’s rule and his feared SAVAK intelligence agency became notorious for the torture of dissidents.
Millions across the country participated in protests against the shah, uniting secular leftists, labor unions, professionals, students and Muslim clergy. As the crisis reached a fever pitch, the shah was doomed by his inability to act and poor decisions while secretly fighting terminal cancer.
In 1978, Crown Prince Reza left his homeland for flight school at a U.S. air base in Texas. A year later, his father fled Iran during the onset of what became known as the Islamic Revolution. Shiite clerics squeezed out other anti-shah factions, establishing a new theocratic government that executed thousands after the revolution and to this day remains one of the world’s top executioners.
After his father’s death, a royal court in exile announced that Reza Pahlavi assumed the role of the shah on Oct. 31, 1980, his 20th birthday.
“I can understand and sympathize with your sufferings and your inner torment,” Pahlavi said, addressing Iranians in a speech at the time. “I shed the tears which you must hide. Yet there is, I am sure, light beyond the darkness. Deep in your hearts, you may be confident that this nightmare, like others in our history, will pass.”
But what followed has been nearly five decades in exile.
Pahlavi attempted to gain influence abroad. In 1986, The Washington Post reported that the CIA supplied the prince’s allies “a miniaturized television transmitter for an 11-minute clandestine broadcast” to Iran by Pahlavi that pirated the signal of two stations in the Islamic Republic.
“I will return and together we will pave the way for the nation’s happiness and prosperity through freedom,” Pahlavi reportedly said in the broadcast.
That did not happen. Pahlavi largely lived abroad in the United States in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while his mother, the Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, lived in Paris.
Circles of diehard Iranian monarchists in exile have long touted dreams of the Pahlavi dynasty returning to power. But Pahlavi has been hampered in gaining wider appeal by a number of factors: bitter memories of his father’s rule; the perception that he and his family are out of touch with their homeland; and repression inside Iran that aims to silence any opposition sentiment.
At the same time, younger generations in Iran born decades after the shah’s rule ended have grown up under a different experience; social restrictions and brutal suppression by the Islamic Republic and economic turmoil under international sanctions, corruption and mismanagement.
Pahlavi has sought to have a voice through social media videos, and Farsi-language news channels such as Iran International have highlighted his calls for protests. The channel also aired QR codes that led to information for security force members within Iran who want to cooperate with him.
Mahmood Enayat, the general manager of Iran International's owner Volant Media, said the channel ran Pahlavi's ad and others “on a pro bono basis" as “part of our mission to support Iran’s civil society.”
In interviews in recent years, Pahlavi has raised the idea of a constitutional monarchy, perhaps with an elected rather than a hereditary ruler. But he has also said it is up to Iranians to choose.
“This regime is simply irreformable because the nature of it, its DNA, is such that it cannot,” Pahlavi told The Associated Press in 2017. “People have given up with the idea of reform and they think there has to be fundamental change. Now, how this change can occur is the big question.”
He has also faced criticism for his support of and from Israel, particularly after the June war. Pahlavi traveled to Israel in 2023 and met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime hawk on Iran whose criticism of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal fueled Trump's decision to withdraw America from the accord. Netanyahu also oversaw the 12-day war with Iran.
“My focus right now is on liberating Iran, and I will find any means that I can, without compromising the national interests and independence, with anyone who is willing to give us a hand, whether it is the U.S. or the Saudis or the Israelis or whomever it is,” he said in 2017.
FILE - Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran's toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, speaks during a news conference, June 23, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)
