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Infineon Rolling Out First Flash Memory Chips By Hans Nagl Infineon aims by 2007 to become the third-largest maker of the fast-growing NAND type of flash memory chips, popular in camera phones and music players to store photos or songs, Harald Eggers, head of Infineon's memory chip unit, told Reuters in an interview. "This is a determined extension of our product portfolio toward non-volatile offers," Eggers said. Prices of regular computer memory DRAM chips, Infineon's bread-and-butter business, are notoriously volatile. They fell below production prices during the tech slump of recent years, inflicting two years of losses on the company. Infineon still aims to cut the cost of producing DRAM chips by 30 percent in the 2003/04 business year, Eggers said. "For the 2003/04 business year, it is still our goal to cut costs further by up to 30 percent," he said, reiterating earlier goals. Infineon's shares rose after his comments, trading at 11.70 euros, up 3.6 percent on the day, at 5:22 a.m. EST. The company had said that the cost of producing a 256-megabit equivalent chip had fallen to $4.50 by the end of September. Eggers said the share of memory chip sales generated by flash memory will still remain below 10 percent by the end of this business year in September, as the new business is launched. The NAND flash memory market is dominated by South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Toshiba Corp of Japan. In the fourth quarter to September, Infineon posted net profit of 49 million euros ($62.25 million) on sales of 1.76 billion euros, after two years of losses. The company is scheduled to report results for its first quarter to December on January 19. ($1=.7871 Euro) |
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