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Toshiba's new plant to make 40,000 wafers/month

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CIOL Bureau
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YOKKAICHI, Japan: Japan's Toshiba Corp. and its U.S. partner SanDisk Corp. said output at their new flash memory chip plant would be 40,000 wafers per month by the first half of 2007.



The 270 billion yen ($2.55 billion) plant in western Japan, will start producing NAND-type flash memory chips in the second half of this year, the two firms said. A rewriteable memory chip that does not require power to retain information, NAND-type flash memory is widely used in digital cameras and camera-equipped mobile phones.

South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. held a 54 percent share in the global NAND flash market in the third quarter of 2004, while Toshiba had 29 percent, according to data from research firm iSuppli.

The recent launch by Apple Computer Inc. of the iPod Shuffle, a portable music player using flash memory rather than hard disk drives as a memory device, raised expectations for further growth in the flash memory market.



Toshiba has dominated the NAND flash market with Samsung, but new entrants such as Hynix Semiconductor Inc. led to steep price erosion last year and prompted Toshiba to cut its full-year earnings outlook for the year ending on March 31.

Toshiba and SanDisk said they expected global demand for NAND-type flash memory chips to grow to 2.1 trillion yen ($19.86 billion) in 2008, up from 700 billion yen in 2004.

The new 300mm-wafer plant is owned by Flash Partners, a joint venture formed in Sept 2004, owned 50.1 percent by Toshiba, Japan's second-biggest electronics conglomerate, and 49.9 percent by SanDisk, one of the world's biggest flash data storage card producers.

Output during each phase of expansion will be equally shared between the two companies.

After the announcement, the shares in Toshiba were down 0.23 percent at 442 yen. The benchmark Nikkei average rose 0.02 percent.

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