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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (18335)	3/31/1998 8:56:00 PM
From: Ramsey Su	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Is this good or bad, anyone? TOKYO (Nikkei)-Fujitsu Ltd. (6702) and Hitachi Ltd. (6501) will stop fabricating DRAMs in Europe by 2000, shifting facilities there to making microcontrollers and other more sophisticated chips, it was learned Monday. The firms will concentrate DRAM production at domestic plants. Slumping prices of mainstream memory chips have badly eroded profit margins. Each company expects to suffer an operating loss of tens of billion yen at its semiconductor divisions in the year through March. Fujitsu and Hitachi hope to cut DRAM-related costs by halting production in Europe and reducing new investment. Fujitsu is currently producing 2.5 million 4- and 16-megabit chips a month at its U.K. fab, but plans to shift that subsidiary entirely to microcontrollers in 2000, company officials said. Hitachi is making 16M DRAMs at a German fab, which will shift briefly to 64M chips and then scale down output through autumn 1999 until DRAM production ends entirely in 2000. Instead, the fab will turn out microcontrollers for IC cards and other high value-added products, boosting microcontroller output to 90% of the plant's total production in autumn 1999, company officials said. Fujitsu and Hitachi now make DRAMs in large lots in Japan, the U.S. and Europe. (The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Tuesday morning edition)