Samsung on Friday that its first-quarter profit rose 26 percent from the same period the year before amid strong demand for flat screen televisions.

Saturn JSC, a Russian company that supplies photovoltaic systems for satellite applications, is to mass-produce GaAs-based solar cells for the first time.

At ?1.2bn ($1.45bn), the offering was the largest in Europe so far this year and Germany's biggest since Postbank, the formerly state-owned bank, launched in 2004. The company, the Wacker family and Morgan Stanley sold 15m of a total 50m shares.

CEO of Zetex said the LED market will be bigger than DRAM and huge demand for LCD driver IC will occur.

Lexar has asked a U.S. trade agency to ban imports of some NAND chips from Japan's Toshiba

The China-based foundry will boost its capacity to 35,000 wafers per month in 2006 on its ties with Cypress

The plant, with a monthly production capacity of 20,000 wafers, will go into mass production of 8-inch wafers later in June.

Shares of NEC Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Japan's two biggest cell-phone makers, gained after the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported the companies will form a handset parts-making venture with TI to cut production cost.