Toshiba, the No. 2 NAND vendor in the world, Samsung Electronics Company Limited, has announced that it will break ground in June 2010 on its Fab 5 in Yokkaichi on a site adjacent to its 4 other fabs there. Fab 5 was initially scheduled to break ground in 2009, but Toshiba had put the plan on hold in January 2009 amid the economic downturn.

Many projects that had been put on hold during the hard times of the late 2008 and early 2009 will be resumed, according to analysts.

The shortage of NAND, which started in 2009, is expected to keep prices firm into 2011, and vendors are likely to add capacity.

According to Jim Handy, a NAND and SSD analyst at the research firm Objective Analysis, prolonged periods of stable pricing always prompt vendors to add capacity in order to maximise profits till the industry reaches a state of overcapacity, when average selling prices start falling.

The overall installed capacity for memory vendors dropped by 8% to% in 2009, though this was mostly because of reductions in DRAM capacity.