A company spokesman said the company had no plans at present to lay off any employees at the plant as a result of the change. Earlier this month NEC announced plans to cut 700 jobs at a California chip plant, due to declining semiconductor demand, and to halt the facility's production of DRAM chips by June, shifting towards higher-margin devices such as chips for the communications market. The rest of Japan's five big chipmaking conglomerates will also announce earnings results and forecasts on Thursday and Friday. NEC and Hitachi have formed a joint venture, Elpida, to undertake future DRAM development and manufacturing operations for the two companies. The spokesman said NEC makes about 210 million DRAM chips per month based on a 64 MB equivalent, of which nearly 40 percent are made abroad.
DRAMs account for the bulk of the memory chip figure.
The company also said in February it would boost its production of Rambus DRAM chips, which are faster than conventional DRAMs and command a higher price. Toshiba, Japan's other leading producer of DRAM chips, is also aiming to boost the proportion of Rambus DRAMs, which are used in Sony's PlayStation2 game console and chipsets for Intel's new Pentium 4 processor. Japanese chipmakers' DRAM operations have struggled to compete with more efficient producers such as South Korea's Samsung Electronics and US chipmaker Micron Technology. NEC's shares ended morning trade up 2.77 percent at 2,225 yen, modestly outperforming a 1.41 percent gain in the technology-sensitive Nikkei average. See Chips Central for daily hardware news, including interactive roadmaps for AMD, Intel and Transmeta.