14 DAY TRIAL // Japanese company Renesas Electronics is reportedly planning to outsource advanced technologies such as MONOS to Taiwan’s TSMC as an extension of their current semiconductor manufacturing agreement.
This is quite a serious move that the Japanese company is showing now, as Renesas is practically one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing companies.
Back in 2011, Renesas Electronics had a 3.6 percent market share, being surpassed only by Toshiba Semiconductor with a 4.3 percent share, Texas Instruments with 4.5 percent, and Samsung Electronics with 9.3 percent, and finally Intel Corporation with the biggest market share of 15.9 percent.
Renesas started out in Japan in 2003 as a joint venture between Japanese companies Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric.
In 2010 it merged with NEC Electronics and this made the company become the fourth largest semiconductor manufacturing company in the world at the time.
Currently, Renesas has a working agreement with TSMC, and it is outsourcing production on the 90nm manufacturing level.
Now the Japanese company is extending their previous agreement to include 40nm manufacturing and potential future technologies, which leads us to believe they are practically planning to retire from semiconductor manufacturing.
“In order for us to achieve further global growth, we are confident that TSMC will provide us with significant benefits in accelerated time-to-volume production and maximum flexibility in addressing the volatile fluctuation of the market demand,” said Shinichi Iwamoto, senior VP of Renesas Electronics.
The company seems to have changed its strategy ever since the Great East Japan earthquake last year.
As many of you remember, each moderate to serious earthquake usually lead to increased prices in various computer hardware, as HDD or memory factories were affected.
The Japan disaster that happened last year is most likely responsible for a great part of the 62.6 billion yen loss that Renesas posted at the end of March this year.
Renesas will count approximately 6,000 jobs which represent around 15 percent of their current 42,000 worldwide workforce.