Nokia said on Friday it had agreed to close its Salo plant in Finland after talks with union representatives, and repeated it aims to cut 3,700 jobs in its home country.

Japan's Fujitsu is in talks to sell its main semiconductor plant to TSMC, sources close to the matter told Reuters on Friday.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, girding against a shortage of chips, said he wouldn't rule out owning a manufacturing plant or tapping the company's cash pile to ensure access to needed parts. Qualcomm is weighing different business arrangements with its suppliers and would consider "writing big checks," said Jacobs.

China's Hony Capital plans to sell or outsource the operations at Elpida Memory's Hiroshima DRAM plant to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) if its bid for the bankrupt Japanese chipmaker is successful, the Nikkei business daily said on Tuesday.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has unveiled a new plant in the mountains of central Taiwan - not to make computer chips, but tea.

Renesas Electronics and two other big Japanese chip makers have begun talks to combine their system chip operations and outsource production in a government-backed deal, sources said.

Samsung Electronics has won government approval for its plans to set up a memory-chip factory in China.

Wacker Chemie said Thursday streamlining at its Siltronic unit will result in a plant closure in Japan and expenses about of EUR70 million. Siltronic is Wacker Chemie's semiconductor division.

Globalfoundries has postponed its plan to start building the Gulf's first microprocessor-fabrication plant in Abu Dhabi next year.

A public-private fund that will acquire the small- and mid-size LCD operations of Toshiba, Hitachi and Sony will also buy a Panasonic factory for about JPY20 billion (US$255.5 million), Japanese business daily The Nikkei said.

Spansion plans to consolidate its two test and assembly manufacturing operations which will result in the closing of its Kuala Lumpur facility, according to the company.

Innovation Network Corp. of Japan is making final arrangements to buy a liquid crystal display panel plant from Panasonic Corp. to boost the production capacity of a joint LCD venture it is forming with three manufacturers, sources said Friday.

Panasonic Corp will drop a plan to convert a television panel plant in Japan into a solar panel factory, hit by an industry price war and a strong yen that is making exports less competitive, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The state-owned Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) is seeking a stake in a plant planned by Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group in the Latin American country, said Brazil's science and technology minister Friday.

Fuji Electric has announced that it will spend JPY18.5 billion (US$240 million) to build an assembly line for power semiconductors at its Yamanashi Prefecture plant. The line will process 8-inch silicon wafers to make the semiconductors.

China has called on Taiwanese companies to ensure work safety after a deadly explosion last week at a plant operated by Foxconn where Apple's iPad2 was being assembled. An initial investigation showed that the accident may have been caused by an explosion of combustible dust in the polishing workshop.

Chip manufacturing firm Globalfoundries will begin construction of a new manufacturing plant in Abu Dhabi next year, the majority stakeholder of the company said on Friday.

The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has asked the government for help compensating victims of the crisis.

Japanese voters are critical of Prime Minister Naoto Kan's handling of the crisis at a crippled nuclear plant and support raising taxes to finance rebuilding plans after last month's earthquake and tsunami, surveys show.

An aftershock that shook Japan's northeast region temporarily shut down power supply and makeshift cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant Monday, highlighting the vulnerability of the crippled facility a month after a massive earthquake triggered the nation's worst nuclear-power crisis.

Japan has announced that it is to extend the evacuation zone around a crippled nuclear plant, as the country held a silence to mark one month since the devastating earthquake and tsunami. The zone will encompass areas where there is a radiation risk beyond the existing 20-km (12-mile) radius.

LDK Solar has announced a business investment of approximately US$40 million to establish a new manufacturing plant in Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province (China). This new manufacturing facility will have capacity to supply two million 2-inch equivalent pieces of sapphire wafers per year and be positioned to capture the growing opportunities in the LED industry.

Freescale Semiconductor won't reopen a seriously damaged chip factory in Sendai, northern Japan, the company said on April 6. The plant had been due to close at the end of 2011.

South Korea's LG Chem on April 6 completed what it described as the world's largest battery plant for electric cars and vowed to become a major producer by 2015. The company said the factory in Ochang, south of Seoul, has enough capacity to produce lithium-ion batteries for 100,000 of the green autos a year.

TowerJazz has signed a non-binding term sheet contemplating its purchase of Micron Technology's fabrication facility in Nishiwaki City, Hyogo, Japan. The proposed purchase would nearly double TowerJazz's current internal manufacturing capacity, increasing production by 60,000 wafers per month.

Production was suspended at the plant in Iwate Prefecture after suffering damage in the March 11 earthquake. The plant makes microcontrollers and large scale integration chips.

Renesas's semiconductor plant in Yonezawa, Yamagata Pref., re-opened on March 19.

Emergency crews at Japan's earthquake-hit nuclear plant in Fukushima prevented the radiological crisis from spinning further out of control on Friday (Mar. 18), but their efforts appeared to be too late to prevent contamination of inhabited areas around the site.

General Motors has announced plans to temporarily idle its pick-up truck plant in Louisiana due to a parts shortage stemming from the crisis in Japan.

Hynix Semiconductor said in a regulatory filing that it would spend KRW637 billion (US$567.7 million) by March to expand and upgrade its existing plant and conduct R&D.

Samsung Fine Chemicals agreed with MEMC to set up an equally owned venture for a poly-Si plant in South Korea. They will build the facility on an existing Samsung Fine Chemicals property in Ulsan, according to a joint e-mail statement.

Solar Frontier, a unit of Japanese refiner Showa Shell Sekiyu,said it began production at a 100 billion yen(US$1.2 billion)thin-film solar module factory.

Yesterday First Solar closed at a new 52 week high after Goldman Sachs posted a Buy recommendation and news of a $1 billion manufacturing plant in Vietnam hit.