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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (28117)	2/9/1999 4:31:00 PM
From: Duker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

A service of Semiconductor Business News, CMP Media Inc. Story posted noon EST/9 a.m., PST, 2/9/99 Hitachi unfreezes capital spending to upgrade DRAM fab semibiznews.com TOKYO -- Hitachi Ltd. here has made a last-minute addition to upgrade its major fab at Hitachinaka, Japan. The company added $90 million to its semiconductor capital spending, boosting the tab to a total of $440 million by the end of the current fiscal year on March 31 Last fall, Hitachi froze all of its chip-equipment investment after incurring major net losses. However, a spokesman said the company decided in spite of the profit loss to invest more to increase the capability of its leading DRAM fab. He confirmed that Hitachi's chip division is expected to incur operating losses of nearly $1 billion in the current fiscal year. The parent firm is expected to report a net loss of $3.3 billion for fiscal 1998. In another Japanese fab upgrading, Sharp Corp. said it is ramping up 0.25-micron processing at its Fukuyama plant after postponing initial production last summer in the global market slump. The fab is expected to produce 10,000 8-inch wafers a month, mostly for flash memory and SRAMs for mobile telephones and masked ROM chips for video games. -- Jack Robertson --