Recent press release from INTEL :
Intel to invest $99 mln in Shanghai plant
SHANGHAI, Nov 13 (Reuter) - Intel Corp will invest $99 million in a plant in the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone of Shanghai
to assemble and test flash memory chips, Intel's executive vice-president Gerry Parker told reporters.
It will be Intel's first manufacturing plant in China and most of its output will be exported, Parker said. He declined to give
annual output volume.
Construction at the site will begin in December and the plant is expected to start production in mid-1998, employing 500
people in the first phase, Parker said.
Waigaoqiao is the largest free trade zone in China, with sufficient space for such a big manufacturing facility and offering tax
benefits, especially for export, Thomas Hartman, vice president of Intel's technology and manufacturing group, told reporters.
Intel will own 100 percent of the plant.
"We like to produce in the areas where we sell product," Hartman said. "Our China market is growing substantially and we
like to participate in that environment."
"Today we are making all the flash memory that we make in Manila. We do not like that exposure," he said.
"We like to have it distributed so we would like to get to the point where every product we make we do not make more than
50 percent of it anywhere, so we are bringing up this factory to make half or so of the flash demand," he said.
Parker said that the plant would be a world-class high technology manufacturing site, equal to any of the company's assembly
and test sites worldwide.
"This site is a critical part of our long-term strategy to meet demand for flash memory, one of the industry's leading growth
segments," Parker said.
The flash memory chips produced in Shanghai will be used in consumer electronics applications and computers, including
personal computers, mobile phones and digital cameras, he said.
The high quality of engineering talent in Shanghai was one factor in putting the plant here, he said.
He and other Intel officials declined to give figures for its sales or projected sales in China, other than to say that the personal
computer market here was growing and had become sophisticated quickly. |
