By Choi Sung-jin
Japan, China and Taiwan will jointly build a memory chip plant in China, industry sources said Monday. The three countries want to combine their respective competitive advantage to challenge Korean semiconductor makers that dominate global markets, they said.
According to sohu.com, Sino King Technology, a chip design company set up by Yukio Sakamoto, former CEO of Elpida Memory, has recently signed a contract with the municipal government of Hefei, Anhui Province, to build a semiconductor plant.
Sino King will invest about 800 billion yen ($6.9 billion) into building the large-scale, up-to-date chip-making factory, while beginning to design next-generation DRAMs that consume less electricity. The plant is scheduled to start mass production of the next-generation memory chips in the latter half of 2018.
In a three-way division of labor, Japan will design chips, Taiwan will handle mass-producing technology and plant operation, and China will provide funding and manufacturing.
Only 10 semiconductor engineers are now working at Sino King, but the company plans to hire more than 1,000 experts from the three countries. The Chinese government is expected to provide positive support, too. In 2114, the Beijing government created a 120 billion-yuan fund to promote China’s semiconductor industry.
“Currently, the global memory chip market is the oligopoly of Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, and therefore joining it as just a latecomer has little chance of success,” sofu.com said. “Sino King will likely make its bid in the next-generation, low electricity-consuming next-generation chips that will be a prerequisite for Internet of Things-based home appliances.”
Sakamoto, who led Japan’s largest memory chip maker but lost out to Samsung, is trying to make a comeback.
China’s national player is Tsinghua Unigroup. Tsinghua Uni, which plans to spend up to $30 billion to buy out global semiconductor makers.
“We will create a fund along with our partners to invest in the semiconductor area,” the China Daily quoted Xu Jinghong, head of Tsinghua Holdings, as saying. “The fund’s size will be between 100 billion yuan and 200 billion yuan.”
Tsinghua Uni acquired a 25 percent stake in Taiwan’s SPIL and ChipMOS with a total investment of 13.5 billion yuan last December. In November, Tsinghua Uni bought 25 percent of Taiwan-based Powertec, the world’s largest chip-packaging company, for $600 million.
The three Taiwanese companies that have advantages in semiconductor packaging and testing will likely be responsible for Tsinghua Uni’s back-end process. The Chinese company also plans to invest 60 billion yuan to build manufacturing lines, with the aim of becoming one of the world’s three-largest producers.