I'd say, NXP simply does not want to sell cheap (deep-sub-$) microcontrollers, that's all (this is also IMHO the reason why Intel dropped microcontrollers at all - they are too cheap a business for them). I believe this "market segment" is going to be (or is already be) dominated by the second-tier and far-eastern companies, and they simply don't want to compete with them.

Now how is this going to match with the fact that NXP just a couple of months ago introduced the new wide-supply-voltage version of LPC9xx (i.e. ghte LPC97x and LP98x), I have no idea. I'd also like some of the native English speakers to try to decipher the snippet of the Marketing Manager's speech I could not understood - it might be just some "uhm" but maybe there's a "not" in there, which changes its meaning quite a lot.

Ironically, the "LPC" was supposed to stand for "Low Pin Count" [derivative of 8051], yet nowadays it's a NXP "trademark" used to denominate their ARMs, which are definitively far from being Low Pin Count...

JW