Memory chipmaker Winbond Electronics Corp (
"The case is always changing," the official said, adding that Winbond will appeal the verdict.
If the verdict stands and the products concerned are prohibited from entering the US, Winbond will incur limited losses from reduced sales in the US amounting to NT$50 million, the official said.
The US appeals court lifted the temporary stay granted last month shortly after the US International Trade Commission ruled that three companies, including Winbond, had infringed one of Atmel's patents for non-volatile memory chips. Atmel manufactures advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency semiconductors.
With the stay lifted, the commission's limited exclusion order prohibits the unlicensed entry into the US of products containing the infringing devices. Infringing devices may enter the US under a bond of US$0.78 per device during a 60-day presidential review period. That review period ends in mid-December.
"We will prepare the relevant documentation to issue an appeal before the end of December," the official at Winbond said. "Winbond will announce its own opinion on this restriction before the end of this month," he said.
Still, whatever the result of the case that began in 1997, the impact on Winbond will be relatively limited, analysts said.
"Flash memory accounts for less than 5 percent of Winbond's total sales, so the impact shouldn't be so significant," said Connor Liu, an analyst at SG Securities Ltd in Taiwan. Yesterday, shares in Winbond fell 3.41 percent to NT$31.20.
"What's more important is the dynamic random access memory price, because DRAM accounts for 60 percent to 65 percent of Winbond's total sales," said Liu.
The industry standard 64-megabit 8X8 DRAM chip was trading down 1.2 percent from the previous day at an average price of US$3.32 yesterday on DRAMeXchange.com, an e-market place for DRAM trading.
Further, if the amount of the infringing devices exported to the US is small, Winbond could temporarily stop exporting the products to the US until the case is resolved, analysts said. The exclusion order covers only devices being imported into the US.
"If the effect is limited, it doesn't matter if they don't ship them to the US," said Jeffrey Cheng, an analyst at Yuanta Securities Co. However, Winbond would most likely want to continue to export the devices to the US, Cheng said, and should be able to find a way to resolve the case in such a way so as to do so.
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