Infineon to buy White Oak interest from Motorola
semibiznews.com
A service of Semiconductor Business News, CMP Media Inc.
Story posted 9 a.m. EST/6 a.m., PST, 7/14/99
SAN FRANCISCO -- Infineon Technologies AG within the next week is slated to announce it will buy out Motorola Inc.'s 50% stake in White Oak Semiconductor Co., their joint production fab outside Richmond, Va., according to local government authorities exhibiting at the Semicon West '99 show here.
White Oak originally was a joint DRAM fab for the two companies. When Motorola dropped out of the DRAM market, the U.S. firm said it would eventually use its share of White Oak capacity to build SRAMs. That plan never materialized and Infineon in the meantime has been buying Motorola's 50% share of DRAMs produced at the fab.
This would be the second Virginia joint-venture DRAM fab this month to witness one partner buying out the equity interest of the other. IBM Corp. last week agreed to sell its half interest in Dominion Semiconductor Corp. in Manassas, Va. joint DRAM fab, to Toshiba Corp. for about $245 million. (see July 6 story).
Last April Ulrich Schmacher, president of Infineon, declined to comment when asked by SBN about reports that Motorola was negotiating to sell its 50% stake in White Oak to its German partner.
When Infineon takes full control of the White Oak fab, the transaction is expected to make little change in the Virginia operation. Infineon already is taking all of the DRAM production, and is already effectively controlling the White Oak fab.
The Virginia fab has space to build a second stage as large the current initial facility. However, in today's glutted DRAM market, Infineon has no plans at this time to start building the second stage.
Motorola has its own plans to build a new megafab at West Creek, Va., also near Richmond, but this has been placed on hold during the firm's restructuring process. |
