Shares of Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電子) surged 2.15 percent yesterday in Taipei trading on speculation that the memorychip maker was considering buying Micron Technology Inc’s NOR flash memory business.
Winbond’s shares closed at NT$11.9, their highest in about a week, while the TAIEX only rose 0.48 percent.
Winbond shares rallied after the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported that the Hsinchu firm was seriously studying the feasibility of acquiring Micron’s NOR flash memory business, which, if the deal is completed, would make it the biggest NOR flash memory supplier with a 37 percent share of the market.
LOOKING FOR AN EXIT?
The newspaper said Micron was seeking potential buyers because it wants to exit the sector, citing unspecified semiconductor equipment suppliers as saying a continued price decrease has significantly reduced revenue contribution from NOR flash memory.
DRAM and NAND flash memory chips have become major revenue sources for the US chipmaker, the newspaper said.
According to Micron’s financial statements, DRAM chips accounted for 61 percent of its total revenue amounted US$3.97 billion during its fiscal first quarter of this year.
Winbond and Chinese NOR flash chipmaker GigaDevice Semiconductor (Beijing) Inc (兆易創新) were on Micron’s short list to sell its NOR flash business, the paper said.
TRUMP
However, Winbond would appear to have a greater chance of winning the deal, given the bumpy start in US-China trade relations under US President Donald Trump’s new administration, it said.
Winbond yesterday responded to media speculation in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange saying the Economic Daily News’ report was groundless.
Winbond was not the only memorychip maker that out-performed the broad stock market yesterday.
NANYA TECHNOLOGY
DRAM chipmaker Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) saw its share price jump 2.95 percent to NT$47.1, driven by the strong outlook for the industry.
“We expect DRAM prices to keep rising in the upcoming two quarters,” Nanya president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) said by telephone. “The price increases this quarter will be bigger than we expected as supply constraints continue.”
Lee’s comments came after the company posted a monthly decline of 4.59 percent in revenue last month at NT$4.07 billion (US$131 million) from NT$4.26 billion in December last year. The contraction was largely due to fewer working days last month, causing a 14 percent reduction in shipments.
DRAM prices soared 12 percent last month alone, as tight supply boosted chip prices, especially prices for some new longer-term supply contracts, Lee said.
That will help lift Nanya Technology’s gross margin further during the current quarter, from 31.1 percent in the final quarter of last year, he said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
RSS