Toshiba Corp, Japan’s biggest memory-chip maker, will start construction of a flash-memory plant in July, reviving a plan to expand production capacity that was shelved during the recession.
The facility, a fifth production line at Toshiba’s manufacturing site in Yokkaichi, central Japan, will be completed by next spring, the Tokyo-based company said yesterday, without disclosing the cost.
The expansion comes as rising sales of smartphones including Apple Inc’s iPhone boosts demand for NAND memory, the chips used to store songs and pictures in portable devices. Revenue in the NAND flash-memory market will climb 34 percent to US$18.1 billion this year, researcher ISuppli Corp said.
Although Toshiba remains undecided on the size of its chip investment in Yokkaichi, the construction of a plant implies the company is planning to increase its output and tap capacity that is currently unused, Hiroki Yamazaki, a Toshiba spokesman, said. The chipmaker will build the plant without the help of partner SanDisk Corp, said Kaori Hiraki, a Toshiba spokeswoman.
Toshiba has capacity to make a combined 260,000 wafers per month at its two most sophisticated production lines in Yokkaichi, jointly operated with Milpitas, California-based SanDisk. Capacity at those existing plants could be expanded to a total of 360,000 wafers per month, Yamazaki said.
Toshiba’s investment would total ¥350 billion (US$3.9 billion), public broadcaster NHK reported, without saying where it got the information. The Nikkei Shimbun last month quoted a figure of ¥800 billion spent over three years.
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