Shrugging off the penalties that have to be paid for manufacturing in Germany, Hitachi Ltd has decided to expand its wafer fab in Landshut rather than build on a new site elsewhere. The company is investing $300m to expand production capacity for memory chips and microcontrollers at the plant. The expansion will triple monthly production capacity for 16M-bit memory chips to 3m in the second half of 1998 from 1m now; capacity for microprocessors and microcontrollers will rise to 500,000 a month in the second half of 1998. The plant has just started mass production of microcontrollers and is currently doing thousands a month. The expansion will add about 260 jobs to the 700 currently employed there.
