Intel dumps its home: memory chips sold to Hynix for $9 billion

Following NVIDIA’s acquisition of Arm, AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx, the chip industry once again ushered in a big consolidation case.

According to media reports, the chip giant Intel is about to enter into an agreement with South Korea’s Hynix Semiconductor for about $ 9 billion, the former will sell the memory chip business to the latter. This also means that Intel may have to reorient itself, this move will enable the semiconductor giant to reorient itself, to exit this historically important, is facing increasing challenges in the field.

Intel is understood to be selling off a division that produces NAND flash memory products primarily for devices such as hard drives, USB flash drives and cameras. Affected by falling flash memory prices, Intel has been considering exiting this business for some time.

Although Intel is known for producing the central processors at the heart of personal computers, it actually started out as a memory manufacturer in the late 1960s, only for fierce competition from Japan’s booming electronics industry in the 1980s to prompt a later change of direction.

The memory chip market declined sharply in 2018 amid an oversupply environment, but began to recover late last year. Analysts expect the NAND chip market to remain strong in the coming years as the data storage business surges.

Intel has come under increasing pressure in recent years. Since the beginning of the year, the company’s shares have fallen about 10 percent, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has risen about 30 percent. In July, Intel said that the second half of this year’s results will be worse than expected, and further delayed the launch of the ultra-fast 7-nanometer chip technology as the basis for the next generation of central processing, Intel shares fell more than 15% in response. Intel’s current market capitalization is about $230 billion.