Sandisk marks opening of its first production plant in China

SanDisk Corporation has announced the opening of its production facility in Shanghai, the company's first in the People's Republic of China. Based in Zizhu Industrial-based Science Park, SanDisk Semiconductor (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. (SDSS) is expected to play a critical role in SanDisk's worldwide operations as the plant will focus on the assembly and test of its advanced flash memory products for mobile and other consumers in markets worldwide. SanDisk's worldwide operations function will also reside at the Shanghai facility. The announcement was made today at a press conference held at the facility.

The new SanDisk manufacturing plant produces a flash memory-based chip package called System-in-a-Package (SiP), which is particularly valuable in mobile phones where there is limited space due to their small size.

"Shanghai is a strategic location that is close to our supply partners and allows us to stay ahead of the curve as we seek to bring our products to market faster," said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief operating officer at SanDisk. "We believe our new state-of-the-art facility will help us to meet the growing demand for storage cards as consumers increasingly use their mobile phones to view photos, listen to music as well as record and play videos."

The new 34,000-square-meter facility is a vertically integrated production operation with all test and assembly processes carried out at the plant-from receiving wafers from the company's fabrication sources, or fabs, based in Japan to shipping complete products to customers. The production capacity of SDSS is expected to meet approximately 30 percent of SanDisk's SiP products projected global demand.

Mehrotra added, "From Shanghai, SanDisk will lead our global drive for ever-improving operational efficiency and effectiveness to further strengthen our leadership in areas of product quality, competitive cost and customer satisfaction. The transformation of our supply chain is a strategic step for the next phase of growth for SanDisk."

Randhir Thakur, executive vice president of technology and worldwide operations at SanDisk, said, "Our new facility will produce some of SanDisk's most technically sophisticated flash memory products, such as the 4 and 8 memory-die stacks required in high capacity microSD(tm), SDHC(tm) and Memory Stick Micro(tm) (M2) cards for mobile devices, with plans to set up a locally based development team for new products. The selection of Zizhu Science Park for our plant location gives us an advantage in recruiting the wealth of talent from neighboring leading universities-Jiaotong University and Huadong University-as well as from the Shanghai area."

Thakur commented, "We would like to thank the Shanghai Municipality, Minhang District and Zizhu Science Park for their tremendous support. This support has helped SanDisk establish its presence in Shanghai and build this state-of-the-art facility in record time."

Juha Raisanen, senior vice president at SanDisk, is responsible for managing end-to-end supply chain and overseeing SanDisk's worldwide back-end manufacturing operations organization. His office will be located at the Shanghai facility. C. K. Lin has been appointed general manager of the SanDisk Semiconductor (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. factory.

SanDisk