Toshiba to spend Y500 bln to up flash output-paper

Sun Mar 5,

TOKYO, March 6 (Reuters) - Toshiba Corp. (6502.T: Quote, Profile, Research) will spend about 500 billion yen ($4.3 billion) to raise output of flash memory chips at a plant in Japan, the Nihon Keizai business daily said on Monday.

Toshiba will start building a fourth flash chip facility at its plant in Yokkaichi, western Japan, by the end of this year, the newspaper said. Its partner, SanDisk Corporation (SNDK.O: Quote, Profile, Research), the world`s largest supplier of flash data storage cards, will shoulder an unspecified part of the investment.

A Toshiba spokesman said it would continue to make necessary investments from now on but added that nothing had been decided yet.

The facility will begin operations as early as 2007 and Toshiba will augment it in stages in line with demand, the report said.

At full production, the new facility will have an output capacity of 100,000 300-mm silicon wafers per month, more than tripling the Yokkaichi plant`s total capacity to the equivalent of 250,000 300-mm wafers a month as early as the year starting in April 2008, the paper said.

Toshiba, the world`s second-biggest maker of NAND-type flash memory chips with about 20 percent market share, aims to catch up with No. 1 maker Samsung Electronics Co. (005930.KS: Quote, Profile, Research), which has more than half of the market.

The market for NAND-type flash memory -- an ideal device for portable electronics since it can retain data without power -- grew 65 percent to $10.9 billion in 2005 from a year earlier, according to research firm iSuppli.

ISuppli expects the NAND market to expand 140 percent to $26.1 billion by 2009. ($1=116.43 Yen)