China's FDIs

[cir]

Samsung plans flash chip line in China
By Hyunjoo Jin

SEOUL | Tue Dec 6, 2011 2:56am EST

(Reuters) - Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday it plans to build a flash memory chip plant in China, seen costing some $4 billion, as a boom in smartphones and tablet computers is set to fuel the $22 billion chip industry's growth next year.

The plant, if approved, would be Samsung's second overseas chip manufacturing site and reflects the growing importance of Chinese market. Samsung, the world's top maker of memory chips and flat screens, is also planning to build a flat-screen production base in China.

The new line "will enable us to meet fast growing demand from our customers and at the same time strengthen our overall competitiveness in the memory industry," the president of Samsung's memory business, Jun Dong-soo, said in a statement. The company said it hoped to have the new line operating by 2013.

The global NAND memory chip market is seen growing 20 percent next year to $26 billion, according to chip price tracker DRAMeXchange.

"China is expected to overtake the United States as the top market for electronics products with its income levels growing," said Kim Young-chan, an analyst at Shinhan Investment Corp.

Samsung, whose flash chips are used in Apple's iPhone and iPad tablet, said it had yet to decide the exact amount of investment or a site for the plant.

Kim estimated Samsung would invest between 4 trillion won ($3.5 billion) and 5 trillion won to build the new facility.

The move is widely seen aimed at catering to Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei Technologies Co and ZTE Corp, which have been steadily raising their global smartphone and tablet market share.

Flash memory stores data even when power is turned off and is widely used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, digital music players and portable USB memory devices. It is also increasingly replacing hard drives as a main memory storage in laptops because it has much faster boot times.

The new production line would use cutting-edge 20-nanometer-class processing technology.

Samsung is aggressively boosting production of flash chips. In September, it started mass production at a new $10 billion chip line in South Korea.

Samsung said it had filed an application for the foreign production base with the South Korean government, which requires firms to make such requests for fear of leakages of the country's prized high technology.

Samsung is the world's biggest NAND flash memory maker with around 40 percent of the market. It competes with Japan's Toshiba Corp, Hynix Semiconductor Inc of Korea and Micron Technology Inc of the United States.

Samsung's sole foreign chip plant in Austin, Texas, has also raised production to full capacity ahead of schedule for logic semiconductors, such as the processing chips used to power mobile devices, after a $3.6 billion investment, it said in a separate statement on Tuesday.

Shares in Samsung closed down 2.1 percent prior to the announcement, lagging a 1.0 percent drop in the wider market.

(Additional reporting by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Ken Wills, Jonathan Hopfner and Matt Driskill)

 

[cir]

Merck & Co to invest $1.5 bln for R&D in China
Tue Dec 6, 2011 6:43am EST

* Beijing facility to employ 600 scientists

* R&D to extend from drug discovery to clinical trials

* Looking for partnerships with biotechs, academic labs

By Don Durfee

BEIJING, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Merck & Co Inc will establish a new Asian R&D headquarters in Beijing and commit $1.5 billion to research and development in China over the next five years.

The No. 2 U.S. drugmaker will eventually employ 600 scientists at its facility, Peter Kim, president of Merck Research Laboratories, told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday, making Merck the latest foreign pharmaceutical company to bolster its presence in China.

"We have plans to invest in research and development at all stages of vaccine discovery and development, starting with basic early discovery all the way through clinical programmes," said Kim.

"We see opportunities to include China in our worldwide clinical trials for our drugs and vaccines."

Aiming to take advantage of China's lower costs and supply of scientists, global drug makers, including Pfizer, Abbott and Novartis, have made big investments in Chinese R&D operations in recent years.

Merck, known as MSD outside the U.S. and Canada, will also team up with biotech companies and academic institutions to develop new drugs, said Kim.

Beijing is home to several of China's top universities as well as the country's food and drug regulator, whose approval is needed for medications to be sold in the country.

The medicines and vaccines developed in Beijing would not be targeted at China or Asia, said Kim, but at a global market, without saying which diseases the centre would focus on.

"(What) we will be looking to do in China, as we do throughout the world, is identify opportunities to develop drugs to treat diseases that would be applicable globally," said Kim.

In an interview with Reuters in late 2010, the company said it expected emerging markets to make up a bigger part of total revenue in the coming years because of an explosion in chronic non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.

It said seven countries -- Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, South Korea and Turkey -- were especially important.

In addition to research, Merck plans to use its new facility to help it bring existing drugs to the Chinese market, said Kim.

The company plans to launch new products in China, including medicines for diabetes, infectious diseases and women's health, said Michel Vounatsos, head of MSD in China, without giving a timeframe.

"We have many new products to be launched in China, which is why we are optimistic about our long term prospects," he said.

By the end of 2010, emerging markets were responsible for about 18 percent of Merck's overall global business and that figure was estimated to grow to 25 percent by 2013, the company said.

The United States is Merck's largest market, generating between 40 and 45 percent of revenue.

 

[cir]

SAP to Double China Workforce, Accelerate Spending by 2015
By Bloomberg News - Nov 15, 2011

SAP AG (SAP), the world's largest maker of business-management software, plans to almost double its workforce in China and invest $2 billion in the country by 2015 to increase revenue as the economy expands.

SAP will hire 2,000 people, adding to a payroll of about 2,500 employees in the country, and double the number of offices from the current five, the company said today in Beijing at its Sapphire conference for partners and customers in China. Investments will focus on sales-force training and developing software that can be exported to other countries.

SAP's investment is part of the Walldorf, Germany-based company's plan to expand emerging markets' share of revenue as it targets a 60 percent increase in global sales by 2015. China's government announced tax and financing measures in October aimed at helping small companies, citing their role in innovation and job creation. SAP's Business One software for small and medium-sized companies is developed in China.

"With that product, we can adopt very quickly in China because it's developed here by Chinese people," Hasso Plattner, SAP co-founder and chairman of the supervisory board, said in an interview in Beijing today. "China is moving so fast," he said. "We made the promise that we will take extra care of this market, extra investment but also extra engagement with the customers."

SAP fell 0.5 percent to 43.82 euros at 11:30 a.m. in Frankfurt trading. The stock has risen 15 percent this year compared with a 3.2 percent gain for competitor Oracle Corp. (ORCL)

China Growth

There are 14 new Business One customers in China every day on average, Plattner said. SAP has about 4,000 customers in China, of which about 2,000 are Business One clients. The company has in excess of 170,000 customers in more than 120 countries.

SAP considers China the most important market for its wider Asia-Pacific strategy as it sees "extremely large companies and an extremely large number of them," Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka said in the same interview.

The company's Hana data-analysis software was first deployed in China in September and has generated "very positive" feedback from customers including soft drinks maker Nongfu Spring Co, according to Sikka.

"China is a very significant market for SAP," Thomas Otter, vice president at Gartner Inc., said by phone from Heidelberg, Germany. Newer products such as mobile applications and Business ByDesign, which customers can access over the Internet rather than installing on their computers, "will be key for SAP's long-term growth in those markets."

ByDesign Distribution

SAP is aiming for 20 billion euros ($27 billion) in annual sales by 2015, compared with 12.5 billion euros in 2010. The Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, generates about 11 percent of yearly sales. SAP doesn't publish a country-by-country breakdown of revenue.

SAP agreed in May to let China Telecommunications Corp. market and distribute ByDesign to small and mid-sized enterprises.

The German company's spending in China will total $2 billion from 2012 to 2015, representing an additional investment of "hundreds of millions of dollars," said Hubertus Kuelps, an SAP spokesman, declining to specify earlier figures.

-- Ragnhild Kjetland, Penny Peng. Editors: Tom Lavell, Robert Valpuesta