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Foxconn 'very confident' of buying Toshiba's NAND business
The nuclear option for troubled Toshiba
Foxconn has confirmed speculation that it is one of the companies bidding for a slice of Toshiba's silicon business.
The news came in a speech given by founder Terry Gou to mark the company breaking ground for a multi-billion-dollar display factory in the southern China province of Guangzhou.
The factory will cost the company nearly US$9 billion, and Bloomberg writes it will turn out 90,000 displays a month using the largest glass substrates currently available.
Back to Toshiba's silicon business, Gou told India's Economic Times “I cannot say we are for sure getting it, but we are very confident.”
If the bid is successful, Gou said the core technologies would remain in Japan, while Foxconn would set up new manufacturing plants in China. He added that “antitrust is not an issue for us”, because the company doesn't have any footprint in the memory business.
Toshiba needs to cover a loss of more than $6 billion in its US nuclear power business, amid a scandal that led its chairman to quit.
To smooth the sale of all or part of its stake in its memory business (co-owned by Western Digital), Toshiba announced plans to spin the business off late last week.
Toshiba hopes bidders will value the chip business at around $13 billion, and we've previously reported that there's been interest from Western Digital, Japanese banks, and private equity firms. ®