Fujitsu Ltd and Hitachi Ltd yesterday each announced memory chip alliances with South Korean companies, leaving the third Korean major, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd as the wallflower. Fujitsu is to ally itself with Hyundai Electrics Co Ltd in the production of 4M- and 16M-bit memory chips to defray some of the huge capital investment costs required for building chip plants, which normally cost nearly $1,000m per production line, said a Fujitsu spokesman. Under the agreement, Hyundai will license its 16M design to Fujitsu, which will make the parts at its Gresham, Oregon plant and sell them to Hyundai to market in the US. The move enables Hyundai to evade the anti-dumping duty imposed by the US government on Korean memory chip imports. Fujitsu will also fabricate the Hyundai designs for its own use. The tie-up also indicates our strong commitment to memory production, and the two are also talking about expanding their co-operation to devices other than memories. Hitachi Ltd is already allied with the Goldstar Electron Co Ltd unit of Goldstar Co Ltd, and has since supplied the company with production technology for 1Ms and 4Ms in return for parts to sell under its own name. Hitachi said yesterday that it will expand its co-operation with Goldstar to the 16M-bit generation. Hyundai Electronics is currently the third largest chipmaker in South Korea, producing 4m 4Ms and 100,000 16Ms a month. Samsung, expected to announce its own partner soon, is the biggest manufacturer ahead of Goldstar Electron, and claims over 10% of the US market for 1Ms. It is allied with Toshiba Corp on Flash memory, and has had some help from Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd on development of dynamics.
