Opps, April fools day article, but great speculation!!
Very big MU dram news. Here is an article which states that MU has agreed to purchase the fab and assets of Jinhua Memory in China. The deal is for the brand new fab with new dram manufacturing equipment which was almost started up when Trump put an export ban on doing any business with the fab. Hard to believe that the news is true since it is two weeks old and has gotten no press. This would be very big news if true.
Published on 04-01-2019 08:00 AM
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 Micron Buries the Hatchet with China
Micron has a very long history of counter cyclical investing, buying the assets of vanquished competitors when the memory industry is at the bottom of the cycle, such as it is right now.
Over the weekend, Micron announced that it had an agreement to acquire the assets of the now stalled Jinhua memory fab in China. Concurrent with the acquisition agreement, the Chinese government will lift all current restrictions on Micron in China now that Micron will be manufacturing memory devices in China.
The fab which Jinhua built in China has been stalled since the US government ordered US equipment makers to stop doing business with Jinhua, similar to what happened to ZTE. This means that after spending several billion dollars building the fab it became essentially useless after US equipment companies such as Applied Materials, Lam, KLA and even Dutch ASML pulled out in a hurry. Although the purchase price was not reported in the press release, we would speculate that Micron paid pennies on the dollar (or yuan) for the idled assets.
Micron CEO comments
Micron's CEO Sanjay Mehrota commented on the proposed transaction, "This deal is very compelling as it accomplishes many things for Micron. It gets us new capacity, in a rapidly growing market, China and it puts an end to all of our legal restrictions in China. We were also able to obtain these assets at a very attractive price given their current under-utilization" , Sanjay added " We are quite pleased with the fab as it has the exact set of tools needed for Micron's process. In addition the fab is physically laid out just like Micron's Taiwan fab including the software infrastructure"
As part of the agreement the US government will unblock sales to the former Jinhua fab which we are sure the current administration will position as a big win, for the US, much as the agreement to restart sales to ZTE.
link for SemiWiki.com article: semiwiki.com |
