Reports: Renesas to tie up with TSMC, cut jobs

Peter Clarke

May 24, 2012

Peter Clarke

HELSINKI, Finland – Renesas Electronics Corp., Japan's largest maker of logic chips, is expected to announce business partnership with foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. for the production of chips on Monday (May 28), according to reports.

Renesas reportedly confirmed it will tie-up with TSMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan) but provided no details. The move to outsource more chip production is seen as a move to combat heavy losses made by the company.

According to The Japan Daily Press there is speculation that Renesas could be about to announce the elimination of 6,000 job, or about 15 percent of the workforce in an attempt to cut annual costs by 50 billion yen (about $630 million).

For the year ended March 31, 2012, Renesas made a net loss of 62.60 billion yen (about $790 million) on revenue of 883.11 billion yen (about $11.1 billion).

The financial year was overshadowed by the consequences of the Great Japan earthquake of March 11, 2011, which closed a number of Renesas facilities and which saw a number of automobile manufacturers facing a lack of microcontroller supply. Renesas has been working with both Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and GlobalFoundries as strategic partners for some time and moved a lot of microcontroller production out to its "fab network."


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