By Matthew Henry

SHANGHAI: Flash memory maker, SanDisk Corporation, today announced the opening of a new memory card manufacturing facility in Shanghai, the company’s first factory in China.

According to SanDisk, the plant is expected to play a critical role in the company’s worldwide operations and will focus on the assembly and testing of its advanced flash memory products for markets worldwide. 

“Shanghai is a strategic location that is close to our supply partners and allows us to stay ahead of the curve as we seek to bring our products to market faster,” said SanDisk president and COO, Sanjay Mehrotra.

“We believe our new state-of-the-art facility will help us to meet the growing demand for storage cards as consumers increasingly use their mobile phones to view photos, listen to music as well as record and play videos.”

The 34,000 square meter facility will produce some of SanDisk’s most technically sophisticated flash memory products, such as the four and eight memory-die stacks required in high capacity microSD, SDHC and Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards for mobile devices, with plans to set up a locally based development team for new products.

According to SanDisk, the facility is a “vertically integrated production operation with all test and assembly processes carried out at the plant—from receiving wafers from the company’s fabrication sources in Japan to shipping complete products to customers”.

The plant’s production capacity is expected to meet approximately 30 per cent of SanDisk’s SiP products projected global demand.

Mehrotra said the transformation of SanDisk’s supply chain will be a strategic step for the next phase of growth for the brand.