The theme was "Strategies for Growth" with a concerted effort to raise profitability within its core divisions, which include semiconductors. Nishida, like many other Japanese executives are now focusing more on the profitability of the company than mere market share positioning. He reiterated the need to strike a careful balance between all business benchmarks going forward.

Another criticism of Corporate Japan was also addressed in the shape of slow decision making. Nishida emphasised the need to speed-up management decision making that would be coupled to continuos innovation in all product areas of the company.

The semiconductor division will now become a major pillar of the company with a significant investment in capacity, advanced processes and new products through 2010.

Top of the "to do list" is the continued expansion of NAND flash production coupled to aggressive node migrations. He pointed out the transition to 70nm flash technology and the quick transition to 50nm and below. In 2006 Nishida expects 50% of NAND production to have migrated to multi-level cell stacking sometime in 2006 and reach 70% of all NAND production within 2008.

Acknowledging the competitive landscape in the NAND market, driving down costs by economies of scale while continuing aggressive node migrations are intended to maintain and grow market share while retaining a sustainable level of profitability.

It must be said that this is nothing new from Japanese chip manufacturers but the difference here is that Nishida looks like backing up the words with capital expenditure required. CAPEX is being set for the next three years at over 1 trillion-yen (1,100 million Yen). Semiconductor share of the figure Nishida stated, would be 50 percent or approximately $ 5 billion US dollars.

However, according to figures by IC Insights, Toshiba would only be the tenth biggest capital spender in the semiconductor industry for 2005 with plans to spend $ 1.380 billion US dollars. The CAPEX plan would take this spending to around $ 1.7 billion US dollars per annum for the next three years.

The company plans to react quicker to NAND demand and be a more aggressive competitor via its JV 300mm fab with SanDisk located in Yokkaichi, Japan. Semiconductor Fabtech's quarterly " 300mm Activity Report" highlighted in the 2Q05 edition that the Toshiba/SanDisk 300mm fab would be reach 20,000wspm by the end of 2006. Total capacity at the Yokkaich fab is 60,000wspm, so much of the CAPEX we believe will be used in capacity expansion rather than on further new fabs for NAND production. However, if Toshiba continues to maintain its strength in the NAND market the Yokkaich fab would near capacity within the three-year program, sparking Toshiba to start building a second NAND Flash dedicated 300mm facility.

But it is not only NAND that will absorbed the CAPEX budget. Nishida also highlighted that its Oita 300mm fab, used for system LSI production would ramp in the second half of 05 to accommodate the start of production for the CELL based microprocessor as well as the RSX Graphics chip. He also noted that the ramp of the fab that started late last year with the help of Xilinx as a foundry partner has gone smoothly. Nishida made it clear that the Oita fab would be fully utilised with these devices and foundry partner. The Oita fab had a start-up capacity of 12,500wspm, but it is not apparent whether that figure is its total potential capacity.