Hitachi to move all DRAM production out of Japan

In one of the most telling pieces of evidence of how the economic tables have turned on Japan’s semiconductor industry, Hitachi announced this week that it expects to end domestic production of DRAM memory chips as early as 2001. The company has been shifting DRAM production to plants in Singapore, where it owns the Hitachi Nippon Steel Semiconductor Singapore subsidiary. The production transfer process will be completed within the next 24 months, Hitachi said. The only remaining Hitachi DRAM factory in Japan is located in Ibaraki.

It will make higher quality ICs such as system LSIs. DRAM production at the Singapore venture currently accounts for more than half of the Hitachi group's production. In the 1970s and much of the 1980s, Japan’s IC industry boomed and DRAM chips were produced almost exclusively at domestic plants that were the show pieces of the country’s economic miracle. But for much of the past decade, Japan’s IC industry has been in a state of recessions and production has moving to plants elsewhere in Asia, Europe and the United States.