AMD and Fujitsu sell off family silver

MAKERS OF CHIPS, AMD and Fujitsu have decided to flog off some shares in the flash memory maker Spansion.

According to the American Statesman, the pair want to dump at least 35 million of their shares in the outfit that they created to make flash-memory chips.

Spansion was formed in 1993 as a joint venture. It was spun off at the end of last year with a a $506 million initial stock offering.

Now Fujitsu and AMD have said they have had enough of the rough and tumble of the flash memory business and want to concentrate on making chips.

Selling Spansion is expected to make AMD and Fujitsu $536 million, which they think will probably just cover all those cheques they wrote to set the outfit up.

However, Spansion has not been doing that well. It lost $100.6 million in the first six months of this year and was losing money last year too.

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