Hitachi to Invest 30 Bln Yen in Non-Memory Chips, Nikkei Says
Tokyo, May 3 (Bloomberg) -- Hitachi Ltd., Japan's largest electronics maker, will invest 30 billion yen ($250 million) by the end of 2000 in new equipment to produce non-memory semiconductors, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported, without citing sources. Hitachi will invest about 10 billion yen by the end of next year to produce high-frequency semiconductors for use in cellular phones at its Takasaki factory outside of Tokyo, about 7 billion yen by the end of this year to produce micro- controllers at a plant in Germany, and the remainder to boost production of large-scale integrated circuits at its factory in Hitachinaka, also near Tokyo. Hitachi has lost money on its semiconductor business the past three years because of a slide in prices for memory chips, the report said.
Worldwide sales of semiconductors fell 8.4 percent in 1998, the biggest decline since 1985, as computer memory-chip prices tumbled, market-research firm Dataquest said on March 30. |
