Toshiba considering overseas NAND plant sites
Fri Sep 8, 2006 5:59am ET
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6502 (Toshiba Corporation )
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Mr. Tadashi Okamura has been serving as Chairman of the Board in Toshiba Corporation since June 2005. He is also a member of the nominating committee... Full Bio
TOKYO, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Japanese electronics group Toshiba Corp. (6502.T: Quote, NEWS, Research), the world's No. 2 NAND flash memory chip maker, said on Friday it was considering overseas sites for its next NAND factory.
"There are factors we feel we must consider in favour of building the site overseas," Toshiba Corporate Vice President Shozo Saito told a symposium in Tokyo. "The incentives are very good, and the proportion of engineers is good."
Toshiba, the second-largest maker of NAND after Samsung Electronics Co. (005930.KS: Quote, Profile, Research), is in talks with SanDisk Corp. (SNDK.O: Quote, Profile, Research) about building an additional factory after a 600 billion yen ($5.2 billion) plant now under construction in western Japan.
Toshiba is investing heavily to ramp up production capacity for NAND, used in portable electronic devices such as Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPod music player.
Japan's Elpida Memory Inc. (6665.T: Quote, NEWS, Research) Chief Executive Yukio Sakamoto said last month it had not decided whether its new plant should be built in Japan or overseas, but that tax and subsidy considerations had narrowed overseas candidates to Taiwan, China and Singapore.
Elpida, the world's fifth-largest maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, is aggressively expanding output capacity to keep its per-chip costs lower than those of competitors Samsung and Hynix Semiconductor Inc. (000660.KS: Quote, Profile, Research). |
