South Korea’s Samsung Electronics is to invest US$1 billion in a “state of the art” microchip manufacturing facility in the Philippines, it was reported yesterday.
The Manila Bulletin newspaper said the facility would be built on a 30 hectare site in the Clark Special Economic Zone near the former US airforce base north of Manila.
Quoting unnamed sources, the paper said “it will be a state-of-the-art” facility with construction starting “within the year.”
At present, Samsung has two operations in the country, Samsung Electronics Philippines Manufacturing Corp and Samsung Electronics Philippines Corp.
The entry of Samsung in Clark will boost the zone as a hub for electronics chipmaking, an unnamed official said.
“This means the country can move upstream to design and manufacturing, as opposed to the low value-added testing and packaging operations,” the official said.
“People at Clark have been in touch with Samsung. They have been talking, exploring possibilities. There is encouraging progress,” Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Favila told Dow Jones Newswires in a phone interview.
Favila said he was still awaiting a full report on the matter, declining to give details of the planned investment.
“Samsung Electronics is exploring various investment opportunities in Southeast Asian countries, but no decision has been made,” company spokeswoman Lee Eun-hee said.
This possible development comes a year after US-based semiconductor firm Texas Instruments Inc formalized plans to invest around US$1 billion over 10 years in a new test and assembly facility in the Philippines.
In related news, Hynix Semiconductor Inc, the world’s No. 2 memory chipmaker, said yesterday it would buy a 2 percent stake in Taiwan-based chip design house Phison Electronics Corp (群聯電子).
Hynix said in a filing with the Korea Exchange that it would spend NT$346.5 million (US$11.4 million) for the stake under an alliance deal aimed at technology cooperation and joint product development.
Under the agreement, the South Korean chipmaker will also supply Phison with NAND flash memory chips until the end of next year and receive an initial payment of US$26.4 million.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Japanese technology giant Softbank Group Corp said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia Corp, raising US$5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier. Tokyo-based Softbank said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia last month, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. Softbank reported its profit in the April-to-September period soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about US$13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7 percent year-on-year
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
RSS