WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.
China: Samsung to build a mobile chip US$7Billion factory in Xian.
Samsung has said it will invest a total of around US$7 billion to establish a manufacturing organisation in China focusing on mobile device memory, with a factory likely to be opened in Xi’an. The investment, which has been approved by the company’s board of directors, will initially be US$2.3 billion and will total US$7 billion over the next several years.
The company said it is “considering” building a factory in Xi’an to produce 10nm-class NAND Flash memory for mobile phones and music players ”to meet growing market demand for NAND products.”
Bloomberg cites US analyst group IHS iSuppli as saying that demand for flash memory - used to store media files including photos, videos, apps and music on mobile devices – will increase by 49 percent between 2010 and 2015. By 2015, IHS iSuppli forecasts that media tablets will account for 17 percent of global NAND shipments, up from 9 percent in 2011.
Samsung produces memory for Apple’s iPhone and iPad as well as its own mobile devices. It opened a new US$10.6 billion facility making NAND flash and DRAM memory in South Korea in September and has a plant in Austin, Texas which makes memory and logic chips, including application processors for mobile phones.
It was reported in January that Samsung Group planned to invest around US$6.5 billion in smartphone and tablet chip technology this year, as part of a larger investment programme across the company.
Samsung is known for making significant investments into technologies ahead of rivals, which has translated into success with flash chips, computer memory chips and LCD flat-screens.