Kioxia Increases Production, Ends 20-Month Reduction

According to TapTechNews on June 17, Nikkei Asia reported that Kioxia has increased the production line operating rate of its two existing NAND flash memory factories located in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture and Kitakami City, Iwate Prefecture in Japan to 100% this month.

This also means that Kioxia has ended its continuous production reduction for 20 months since October 2022, and its NAND flash memory production has returned to normal.

However, Kioxia still has not started the operation of the new wafer fab in Kitakami City, which was originally scheduled to go into production in 2023.

The background of Kioxia's ending the production reduction this time is that the NAND flash memory industry has gradually emerged from the previous trough and shown a recovery trend as a whole. This is mainly due to the recovery of consumer electronics demand and the rapid growth of data center demand caused by generative AI.

The improvement of the industry as a whole has led Kioxia to regain profitability of 10.3 billion yen (TapTechNews note: currently about 475 million yuan) in the last quarter after six consecutive quarters of losses.

The improvement of Kioxia's financial situation also made the loan syndicate composed of three banks agree to refinance Kioxia's upcoming 540 billion yen (currently about 24.925 billion yuan) loan and provide a new credit line of 21 billion yen (currently about 969.3 million yuan).

Kioxia will use the obtained funds for equipment upgrading and new wafer fab construction to increase the production capacity of 218-layer BiCS8 NAND flash memory.

Just recently, Kioxia's partner Western Digital previewed the 2Tb QLC BICS8 particle for the data center market.