Tsinghua Unigroup, a large-scale Chinese state-run semiconductor company, has made an offer to buy up Micron Technology Inc. of the United States.
Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported this on July 14 by quoting a Unigroup official. The price tag is estimated at US$23 billion. Once the deal goes through as proposed, it will be the biggest-ever transaction for a Chinese company to take over a foreign concern.
According to the Japanese business daily's report, the acquisition offer is in line with the Chinese government's national strategy to nurture chip making as one of the most important industries as stated in a March 2015 report "China's Manufacturing 2025" published by the Xi Jinping administration.
Unigroup, or Ziguang Group, is part of Tsinghua University, a national university from which the General Secretary graduated 36 years ago. The company is a fabless focusing on chip design rather than chip production.
Micron is the world's third largest memory chip maker following Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix in terms of market share. The Boise (Idaho)-based company produces memory chip products such as DRAMs and flash memory chips. In 2013, it acquired Elpida Memory (currently Micron Memory Japan) after the Japanese company went bankrupt.
