NEC Japan cuts chip investment

At its headquarters in Japan, NEC officials said the company will cut its planned investment of $1.8 billion in semiconductor production for fiscal 1996 by $170 million, citing the unexpected drop in memory chip prices.

The reduction will affect four factories in Kyushu, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, and Yamagata. Officials said the money was going to be used to renovate existing six-inch wafer fabrication lines, according to a report in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a Japanese business daily.

NEC officials did say that spending abroad will remain at the current projected levels of $500 million dollars, according to the report.

NEC has scaled back chip production in 1996 by 6 percent on an annualized basis, and said it will scale back monthly production of its 16MB DRAMs from a projected 18 million chips to 12 million.