The products of the Flash memory and EPROM joint venture between Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Fujitsu Ltd (CI No 1,963) will be sold exclusively by AMD in the US and Fujitsu in Japan; marketing for the rest of the world has yet to be decided: Fujitsu’s president Tadashi Sekizawa said that Fujitsu intends to develop a profitable business from the non-volatile memory devices, both selling them outside the company to firms such as Sharp Corp and other personal computing makers, and using them in its own products; Fujitsu, 20 times the size of AMD overall, and with a semiconductor division three times the size of AMD, says that the complementary nature of the two partners’ skills will ensure a long-standing relationship; Advanced Micro was number one in the world in EPROMs last year and number two in Flash memory and sees a huge market for the devices, with growth from a low base at a rate of 40% per year to a value of between $5,000m to $10,000m per annum by the year 2000; AMD Japan was established in 1975, primarily to handle sales and support, has a current employee count of 180 people and annual turnover running at around $192m.
