14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Kingston has not been doing all that bad lately – quite on the contrary, as a matter of fact, as it is well enough to plan the construction of a new memory plant for next year. According to a Digitimes article, the company feels that the current infrastructure it has is not able to withstand future demands, so it wants to build a new plant in Taiwan.
Throughout 2008, Kingston's DRAM module and NAND Flash shipments registered a sharp growth, which has led to the conclusion that the company needs more plants to be able to fulfill demand. This year, for instance, Kingston's Shanghai and Shenzhen, China, plants have been running at full capacity. The company plans to expand its manufacturing capacity in China, while also considering building a new plant in Taiwan in the following year. According to the reports now circulating, the new plant may be located in Hsinchu, northern Taiwan.
Currently, Kingston owns production plants in California, Hsinchu, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Malaysia. The Shanghai fab has 18 production lines, being the largest capacity plant of the company. The other manufacturing facilities feature 14 lines in Shenzhen, 10 in Hsinchu, 8 in Malaysia, and 3 niche-type production lines in California, the same source reports. The new plant to be built in Taiwan is meant to complement the existing manufacturing capacity of the other Taiwanese facility, and will add new production lines to the 53 the company has for both DRAM and flash memory products.
The memory industry has seen a general downturn lately, which, in fact, has proved to be a good thing for Kingston, as the company could buy the memory chips cheaper than ever. Moreover, unlike other industry players, Kingston hasn't been too affected by memory prices in the past either. This can only be a good thing for the memory maker, since, while other IT industry giants expect to see smaller-than-expected revenue in the following quarters, it considers now a good time for expanding.