Samsung Electronics reported its highest quarterly net profit in over two years on Friday as its semiconductor and LCD businesses returned to profitability.

"We are very pleased with our return to profitability in the second quarter, driven by increased pricing, higher royalty revenues and strong execution," said company CEO Eli Harari. "We remain cautiously optimistic about the second half of 2009."

Apple said that it has made a US$500 million prepayment to Toshiba for flash memory chips and indicated the market is stabilizing. Intel, which makes flash chips jointly with Micron, is also seeing a recovery in pricing.

While the headlines on Mosaid Technologies are about the patent-infringement suit it launched against IBM, the case won't be resolved for years. Of more pressing concern is whether Mosaid can renew its patent-license agreement with Samsung Electronics.

...Cash flow is improving while Rivals are shutting factories. Perhaps most important, Micron has been cutting its production costs, betting that increased financial efficiency will help it survive any further shakeout along with the market leader Samsung Electronics.

Hynix Semiconductor has said it would cut its investment in a new production facility by 45% and extend the investment period.

"The Company continued to be impacted by the effects of the global economic slowdown and the NAND flash shortage that our customers have been facing...," said Wallace Kou, President and CEO of Silicon Motion.

Dubbed single mode level cell (SMLC) technology, Fusion-io says products using the enterprise class flash offer a cost-effective MLC-based solid-state solution with the endurance and performance of SLC at a much lower cost-per-gigabyte.

There is considerable debate about second-half 2009. Some are bulls. Some are bears. Some are in both camps.

Micron Technology's fiscal third-quarter loss widened on lower sales and a write-down on the value of its imaging unit, but its gross margin turned positive after three negative quarters as the cost of producing chips fell below their selling price. The loss was the 10th consecutive quarterly loss for the memory-chip maker.

Samsung Electronics' memory chip business is expected to return to the black in the second quarter thanks to production cutbacks and steady rises in chip prices.

Toshiba has said it will shoulder US$307 million in restructuring costs from shutting down its old system chip and discrete chip lines as it seeks to unload losses.

SanDisk CEO Eli Harari once plotted to dethrone the iPod with a series of "iDon't" ads--a marketing campaign that cast Apple iPod users as fad-driven sheep, and promoted his company's Sansa media players as the smart alternative.

SanDisk and Samsung Electronics on May 27 announced they have reached an agreement to renew the cross license of their semiconductor patent portfolios. The companies have also signed a flash memory supply agreement under which Samsung will continue to make available to SanDisk a guaranteed portion of its flash memory production output.

Japan's Toshiba plans to raise its chip production in July to levels not seen since it implemented output cuts in January, national broadcaster NHK has reported, in a move that would reflect an improvement in nationwide output levels.

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba plans to reduce fixed costs 10% more than previously announced, a news report said on Sunday.

SanDisk CEO Eli Harari said 2009 could turn out to be "significantly better" than anticipated at the start of the year as big cutbacks in flash memory production bring balance back to an industry stung by oversupply.

Nanometrics has begun shipping its Lynx cluster metrology systems, as a follow-on order to a leading memory manufacturer as part of its plan for high-volume manufacturing of its latest DRAM and flash memory technologies.

After a massive capex splurge on its semiconductor division over the last three years, Toshiba is radically cutting back its chip investments over the coming year.

SanDisk chief Eli Harari delivered some odd news for folks tracking the memory market: Flash memory prices and demand are actually rising.

Toshiba has denied a newspaper report that it will increase capital by 500 billion yen (US$5 billion) this year to strengthen its semiconductor business.

Shares of Toshiba opened down 6.9% on Monday after weekend reports that it plans to raise about US$5 billion in capital to bolster its finances, weakened by its loss-making chip operations and tax costs.

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba has said it is to cut a further 3,900 temporary jobs by March 2010 to cope with the global economic downturn. The news came as it said it expected to report a net loss of 350bn yen (US$3.5bn) for the year to March 2009.

"Samsung Electronics was asked to supply 50 million 8Gb NAND flash chips to Apple, while Hynix was set to supply 20 million," a high-ranking industry source told The Korea Times by Monday.

SandForce has announced a new family of solid-state disk (SSD) processors that the company claims will allow lower-cost, commodity NAND flash memory to be used in data center operations. The disks will also be faster and more reliable for use in mobile applications, the company said.

Three years ago, as head of Toshiba's (TSBAa.BE) power business, Norio Sasaki orchestrated the tech conglomerate's $5.4 billion acquisition of Westinghouse's nuclear-power-plant business. Now, as Sasaki prepares to take over the president's post, he will have to show the same willingness to take chances as he tries to help overhaul the company after its biggest-ever expected annual loss.

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

The NAND rally continues. Vendors continue to increase their component prices, while SanDisk separately raised its flash card tags, according to an analyst. Amid component shortages--and reported "quality issues" at the Intel-Micron joint venture--NAND prices could jump again in 2Q.

The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) workgroup was created in May of 2006 to standardize the low-level interface to NAND flash chips from different manufacturers. However, the two largest NAND flash manufacturers are not members of ONFI. Samsung and Toshiba together account for approximately 70% of global NAND flash production, although their market share has been dropping by around 10% annually since ONFI was first standardized. SanDisk is also notably absent from the list of members.

The ThinkEquity Partners' report centered on SanDisk, which is not one of the four companies Apple actually buys its memory components from (Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba and Micron). However, the report says Apple's voracious appetite for flash RAM is affecting the entire market.

A combination of 200mm fab closures and slowing capacity expansions at existing 300mm fabs is expected to result in a NAND flash capital expenditure decline of 58.9% in 2009, according to DRAMeXchange. In 2008, NAND flash capex declined 27.7%.

SanDisk and Toshiba has announced the co-development of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory using 32nm process technology to produce a 32Gb 3-bits-per-cell (X3) memory chip for products ranging from memory cards to solid state drives (SSD).

SanDisk has announced that it will begin mass-production of 4-bits-per-cell (X4) flash memory. Using 43nm process technology, this breakthrough enables 64Gb memory in a single die. The X4 memory chip combines with the X4 controller chip in a multi-chip package (MCP) to provide a complete, integrated and low-cost storage solution.

SanDisk is disclosing at a San Francisco technology conference Tuesday that it will begin mass production of memory chips that will allow consumers to store up to 64GB of data on tiny flash cards. The company's X4 technology will pack four bits of data into each memory cell. To date, flash memory chipmakers typically stored one bit or two bits per cell.

Recent production adjustments for NAND flash memory won't bring the desired effect of stabilizing and increasing prices, a research report published by Baird suggests. Manufacturers will have to brace for further production cuts and price declines in the second quarter, while consumers should benefit from this scenario through cheaper flash memory devices, especially in SSDs.

Spansion's president and chief executive, Bertrand Cambou, has resigned as the chip company, struggling with declining revenue, looks for a suitor.

SanDisk said Monday that hefty charges to write down the value of assets and inventory amid industrywide price reductions forced the world's largest supplier of flash memory cards to post a larger-than-expected fourth-quarter loss.

The SD Association has announced the next-generation SDXC (eXtended Capacity) memory card specification which will provide up to 2TB storage capacity and accelerate SD interface read/write speeds to 104MB/s this year, with a road map to 300MB/s. Specifications for the new SDXC standard will be released in the first quarter of 2009.

Samsung Electronics denied a report saying it may cut its 2009 investment in semiconductors by more than half from last year amid a lingering downturn. "At this point, we have not made any decisions on our investment plan, and even if we had a plan it would be contingent on different economic scenarios that will be possible during this year," Chu-Woo-sik, Samsung's executive vice president of investor relations, told Reuters.

Taipei-based DRAMeXchange has lowered its outlook for 2009 NAND Flash bit growth from 108.2% to 81%. The market intelligence company cites weakened demand for flash memory as the source, stemming from a decrease in forecast demand for flash memory-based consumer devices in 2009.