(Taipei News) Winbond Electronics Corp. announced today that the Board of Directors approved the sale of the Flat Panel Display business to Cheertek Technology, Inc. for around NT $0.4 billion. The Driver IC of the FPD (Flat Panel Display) products is one of the product lines in Winbond's Logic Business Group. In order to focus on its core business and aggregate the resources in the advanced product lines, Winbond decided to sell its FPD business.
With the synergy between the products and wafer productions as well as the fast-growing market, Winbond's FPD business has yielded significant values and created NT$1.4 billion of revenue in 2005. However, due to very little synergy to be gained between Driver IC and other products in recent years and Company's established policy of focusing on the core products, Winbond has to aggregate the resources on those most competitive products. Therefore, the Logic IC Business Group will be mainly focusing on the developments of Consumer Products, Multimedia Products and Advanced PCs.
The Chairman of Winbond, Mr. Arthur Y.C. Chiao, said "The transaction provides a strategic value for both companies. In the future, Winbond will provide foundry services for Driver IC which will also be opened to other Driver IC design companies. Besides the 6-inch fab, the capacity of 8-inch fab will possibly be utilized for the said foundry services." The change of product strategy will keep Winbond maintaining its core competency on wafer production in the fast growing market.
It will take approximately one month for Winbond to complete the transfer of the intangible assets, fixed assets and staffs of the FPD business to Cheertek. During the transitional period, Winbond will assist Cheertek in managing the supply chain to Winbond's customers; therefore the transfer will have no affects on Winbond's customers.
In the future, Winbond will concentrate on developing products which have core values and creating synergy among businesses, especially on the mC-based consumer electronics products and speech ICs, and on the product integration among notebook, server application TPM (Trusted Platform Module) technology and desktop I/O so that its global leading position in the market can be strengthened. As to Memory Products, Winbond will continue to focus on the Mobile RAM field, mainly in the Pseudo SRAM, and aggressively develop competitive products to satisfy the demands for mobile electronic application. Winbond's 12-inch fab is expected to begin volume production in the first quarter of this year and enter into a growing stage.
Spokesperson
Wilson Wen
Vice President of Administrative Center
Tel:03-5792755
News Liaison
Mike Liu
Deputy Director
Tel:03-5792516
Email:ckliu@winbond.com