Infineon Technologies AG, Europe's No. 2 semiconductor maker, expects made-to-order chipmakers including Taiwan's Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) to produce half of its memory chips by 2005 as it farms out production to cut costs.
The German company wants to reduce to 50 percent from more than 80 percent the proportion of 256-megabit, 266-megahertz double-rate dynamic random access memory chips it makes on its own, said Harald Eggers, chief executive of the memory-chip division.
Munich-based Infineon is hoping lower costs will help it to boost investment in new capacity and raise its share of the memory- chip market. The company says it wants to increase its 18 percent market share by as much as a quarter, as it tries to catch up with leaders Samsung Electronics Co. and Micron Technology Inc.
"If you want to grow from 18 to 25 percent, you have to invest for capacity," Eggers told a dinner gathering in Shanghai.
"We want to be able to share the burden between our partners and ourselves."
Other chipmakers to which Infineon has licensed technology in return for production contracts include Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (中芯國際集成電路) and Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電子), Taiwan's No. 3 chipmaker.
Munich-based Infineon, which has posted nine quarterly losses because memory-chip prices remained below production costs, is moving production to Asia as prices of chips used in personal computers recover. The spot price of the benchmark DRAM chip has risen more than 60 percent from its February low, according to Dramexchange.com, a Taiwan-based online market.
Worldwide revenue from DRAM chips will increase 38 percent to US$5.1 billion this quarter from last year, researcher Gartner Inc.
said. The memory division generates more than half of Infineon's revenue. Total sales of all types of semiconductors will rise 11 percent this year to US$173 billion, Gartner forecasts, as demand for computers and electronic devices increases.
Last month, Infineon said it will work with International Business Machines Corp. and Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd (
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