Hitachi Ltd has bought out Nippon Steel Corp’s 35% stake in their Singapore-based memory chip joint venture, company sources told the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. Hitachi now owns a controlling 70% interest in the former Hitachi Nippon Steel Semiconductor Pte Ltd which is also 30% owned by the Economic Development Board of Singapore. The unit began production last summer and makes two million 64-Mb DRAMs per month. After converting the joint venture into a subsidiary, Hitachi will plans to increase the output to eight million chips a month by the end of the year and reckons the modernization of the plant will allow it to withstand a fall in DRAM prices to $7 each from the current $9 level.
