South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc yesterday unveiled a plan to become the world's top chipmaker in 10 years through aggressive investment in next-generation products.
Hynix, now the world's fifth largest memory chipmaker, said it would boost sales from last year's US$7.7 billion to US$18 billion by 2010 and to US$25 billion by 2012.
"From now, Hynix will take a growth-oriented stance through aggressive investment ... to become the world's best in terms of size and quality by 2017," it said in a statement.
The company said it would invest a tenth of its entire revenue in research and development while continuing to build and upgrade production lines.
It aims to produce a next-generation memory chip called Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM) by 2009.
Industry analysts expect it to become the main memory device, replacing high-density flash memories, within the next decade.
Hynix was on the verge of collapse in 2000 but creditors injected a total of US$4.6 billion in 2001 and 2002 to rescue it.
Last year, its net profit rose 10.7 percent to 2.01 trillion won (US$2.19 billion) after years of successful restructuring.
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