Micron might be abandoning the US
STROKERS OF BEARDS and bean counters fear that chipmaker Micron might be forced to make a lot more cuts on top of the October announcements.
Days after Micron announced that it would shut its flash-memory production line in Idaho and end 1,500 more Treasure Valley jobs, Micron bought a stake in a Taiwanese manufacturer of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, Micron's principal product.
This had lead analysts to think that Micron is moving production out of Idaho and that a long-hoped-for, state-of-the-art fabrication plant might never be built stateside.
Any spare money that Micron has has been invested in buying production capacity in Asia.
Micron just bought a share of the Inotera plant in Taiwan which builds computer memory on 12-inch, or 300-millimeter, silicon wafers, which can turn out more chips at less cost than the 8-inch (200-millimeter) wafers used in Boise now.
Reuters thinks Micron could acquire Infineon's 76 percent stake in Qimonda soon.
The ailing company has posted seven straight quarterly losses, including a $344 million shortfall in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Micron keeps driving down costs to survive. Labour is cheaper in Asia, and plants there are nearer to the computer manufacturing plants operated by some of Micron's key customers. µ
L'Inq
Idaho
Statesman
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Strange story, on the one hand there's wailing and gnashing of teeth over having no money and making no money, and on the other hand a claim they might buy other companies, might make perfect sense in the bush doctrine 2 years ago, but that's in the past.
This article missed on a couple fronts. First, I think the fabs shut down by MU in the US were 200mm lines. At current memory prices, lots of 200mm fabs are being taken out of service around the world, so that doesn't imply an Asian move necessarily. Second, MU did buy Qimonda's stake in Inotera, but just how would buying control of Qimonda outright have anything to do with a trend toward Asia? Qimonda's principal fab is in Virginia (where there happens to be a 300mm MU fab along with its joint venture partner Intel). So, unless Virginia decides to move itself half way around the world, the content of your article and the headline don't match up very well.