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Toshiba raises semiconductor spending, plans more 300mm fabs |
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May 11, 2006 at 11:15 AM |
 Toshiba Corp has almost doubled capital spending across all its divisions as part of a renewed effort to build on its recent success in the semiconductor industry and other market sectors. Over a three year period (2006-2008) the company expects to spend in the region of $18 billion US dollars of which 61 percent will be allocated to its semiconductor manufacturing division.
The company expects to spend the majority of nearly $11 billion US dollars on expanding capacity of NAND Flash production that will include ramping the already announced Fab4 as well as the construction and ramping of another NAND Flash 300mm facility called Fab5.
Average CapEx spend over the three year period amounts to $3.66 billion US dollars, which would put Toshiba into the top 5 CapEx spenders. The company plans to increase production in a timely and continuous fashion, according to presentation materials concerning the business plan.
The company is betting on demand for NAND Flash growing significantly in the period with growth markets starting with camcorders replacing hard drives and other storage media for NAND. The current holy grail is laptop PC's and Toshiba is projecting the adoption of NAND in that product taking off in 2009.
Toshiba is also increasing R&D spending in the new three year business plan for its divisions but is pegging R&D to 6 percent of revenues. In the semiconductor sector, Toshiba will concentrate on next generation non-volatile memory and MLC technology.
The company is also continuing to focus on NAND Flash cost reduction via increased production on 300mm wafers as well as pushing hard on process node migrations. The company will enter pilot production of 50nm NAND Flash in the 2H06 period.
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