Mannerisms

It takes you back to the days when semiconductor CEOs bet the company when they built a fab.

In fact Toshiba’s CEO Atsutoshi Nishida actually said, at the opening, that it is a factory: “On which our company is betting its future”.

Gordon Moore would approve: “It’s a peculiar business”, he once said, “the only sane strategy is to bet the company regularly.”

Interestingly, it was Toshiba which invented flash memory, but Intel which was first to recognise its potential and put the first flash chip, the 28F256, on the market.

Opportunistic CEOs used to make those snap bets in those days. Nowadays there are few CEOs with the courage to do so.

But clearly Toshiba, which has emerged as the pre-eminent Japanese semiconductor company, has confidence in flash, in its ability to scale it, mass-produce it, find new applications for it and out-market Samsung.

Nishida said Toshiba would out-sell Samsung in NAND flash next year – a ballsy forecast when Samsung currently has 45 per cent of the world market and Toshiba 27 per cent.

To make such a forecast, and back it with an 80,000 wafer a month fab, takes a lot of guts. Putting that many more wafers out into the market is an act of faith.

Toshiba says it has built the fab so it can be enlarged to over 200,000 wafers a month, and is planning another new fab for NAND flash to start ramping in 2009.

Awesome.