by Anton Shilov
01/06/2003 | 07:52 PM
Although the news-wires are not full of interesting news these days after Christmas and New Year holidays, there are still some interesting stories to share with you.
Apparently, Elpida, who is seeking for additional funds these days, asked Intel to invest in the joint venture between Hitachi and NEC. According to various reports, Japanese companies are really serious and plan to sign all formal documents in March, before the end of Japanese fiscal year on March 31. Although officials from Elpida declined to make any comments, there are some industry estimates which claim that Elpida needs approximately ¥70 billion ($586.66 million) in order to boost manufacturing capacities.<%BANNER[article]%>
It worth to mention that in early October 2002 Mitsubishi Electric, Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC) and Elpida Memory announced the plan to form a strategic alliance in DRAM operations in order to help each other in developing and implementing advanced manufacturing technologies and consolidate sales operations (see this news-story). There were rumours at the mentioned timeframe that Intel was very interested in the alliance, so, in case now the Santa Clara, California-based giant invests in Elpida, other members of the alliance should also benefit.
Currently Elpida is noted as the number five DRAM memory manufacturer on the planet with 6.4% of the market in 2002, down 2.1 points from 2001 (see the report from Gartner Dataquest in this news-story). The problem of Elpida is not only in insufficient manufacturing capacities, but also in the fact that even current fabs are sometimes not utilised fully. Keep in mind that the new president of Elpida promised that the DRAM market share of his company will achieve 20% by the year 2005 (see this news-story), what is not so easy, to tell you the truth, hence, the company should perform some really aggressive steps.
The collaboration between Mitsubishi Electric, Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC) and Elpida Memory has a lot of bright prospects and analysts state that a very powerful company may finally appear on the market. The consolidated market share should be pretty high with quite good prospects of growing even further, since the newly formed joint venture will be able to offer advanced products at a cheaper price. Now add Intel to it and we will get a very strong DRAM player.
The most important question is what does Intel want from Elpida and possibly their partners. Intel never invests money there, where is nothing important for them. In case they invest, they may have some very interesting plans in regards DRAM chips and DRAM market.
The information was not released officially by any company mentioned above, so, everything is still under the question mark.