Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技), the nation’s No. 2 PC memory chipmaker, yesterday said a report that it planned to sell a stake in Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技) to its US memorychip partner Micron Technology Inc was untrue.
The Taoyuan-based chipmaker’s comments came after Bloomberg reported yesterday about contact between officials from Micron and Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), the parent company of Nanya, that probably took place late last year, citing an analyst with Mirae Asset Securities Co in Seoul.
The sale would herald an industry reorganization, Bloomberg said. Inotera, located in Taoyuan, is a PC memorychip manufacturing -venture run by Nanya and Micron.
“The report is media speculation,” Nanya spokesman Pai Pei-lin (白培霖) said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday. “There is no such thing as what the report said.”
Speculation on mergers and acquisitions has been rife because most Taiwanese PC memorychip makers are expected to drift into losses as chip prices collapsed on oversupply. The benchmark PC memorychip price plunged about 50 percent quarter-on-quarter during the final quarter of last year, based on an estimate by market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) in Taipei.
Last week, Powerchip Technology Corp (力晶科技) and ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) denied reports that top Japanese memory company Elpida Memory Inc planned to acquire the Taiwanese companies in an attempt to compete with South Korean Samsung Electronics Co.
Yesterday, iSuppli predicted that revenues of global PC memorychip makers would fall 11.8 percent to US$35.5 billion this year, compared with US$40.3 billion last year.
“With supply exceeding demand, pricing will decline precipitously for the year, causing revenue to decrease,” iSuppli analyst Mike Howard said in a report released yesterday.
Shares of Nanya climbed 1.85 percent to NT$16.55 yesterday, while bigger rival Powerchip and ProMOS rose 3.03 percent and 0.49 percent to NT$5.78 and NT$2.07.
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