Boston, MA 05/14/2014 (wallstreetpr) – According to reports from Reuters, SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) and TOSHIBA CORP (OTCMKTS:TOSBF) have joined forces to start manufacturing 3D V-NAND starting 2016. Reports from Japan’s Nikkei business daily suggest that Toshiba and SanDisk will share equal investment costs and inject nearly $4.9 billion (500 billion yen) towards set up of a 3D-NAND flash memory plant in Japan. While earlier the two companies had estimated the costs of 400 billion yen, but later agreed to replace the existing facility with a new one by increasing their investment outlay.
Following Samsung
SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) and TOSHIBA CORP (OTCMKTS:TOSBF) partnership indicated that the companies are pro-actively seeking ways to keep pace with the competitors like SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron. Moreover, the decision comes a week later to the Samsung’s completion of its 3D V-NAND plant in Xian, China on May 9. Thus, signalling that the bid to take next-Gen semiconductor memory market space is on for a tough competition from the Japanese and Korean firms.
Focus Shift
With the completion of Xian facility, Samsung is manufacturing 3D V-NAND flash memory chips, stacked up in 24 layers on a mass scale and would soon plan to begin production of 36-layer stack. At the same time, SK Hyniz, is also planning to invest in NAND flash memory. Recently, the world’s fourth largest producer of computer memory chips converted its Cheongju M12 plant into a standalone NAND flash facility, in order to restructure the operations more towards NAND over DRAm. SK Hynx is expected to start the production by the year end. On the other hand, Micron is also gearing up its operations to take a bigger NAND market space.
At present, Samsung claims the first place as a seller of computer market chips with 34.7% share, followed by TOSHIBA CORP (OTCMKTS:TOSBF)’s market share of 32.2%. Therefore, all this points out that Toshiba’s plans could be a significant threat for Samsung in the coming days.
