BERLIN: German wafer fab giant X-Fab Silicon Foundaries is looking at Khazanah Nasional Bhd’s wafer fab company Silterra Malaysia Sdn Bhd in Kulim as a possible acquisition target.
“We are looking at acquisitions around the world and Silterra is one of them,” X-Fab chief executive officer Rudi De Winter told the New Straits Times.
X-Fab is the world’s leading foundry group for analog/mixed-signal semiconductor applications.
The company currently has five plants — three in Germany and one each in Kuching, Malaysia, and in the United States. The plants have a combined capacity of around 72,000 eight-inch equivalent wafer starts per month.
The group has 2,500 workers around the world.
X-Fab has a 65 per cent stake in the Sarawak plant, with the remaining 35 per cent held by the state government.
X-Fab had last November announced it would expand the capacity and capabilities of its Kuching-based foundry operation, X-Fab Sarawak Sdn Bhd, to meet accelerating demand for its core technologies — the 0.18μm and 0.35μm process platforms.
With revenue having grown 25 per cent annually for the past two years and similar growth expected for the next two years, X-Fab plans to invest a total of US$114 million (RM506 million) between last year and next year.
This includes capital expenditure amounting to US$29 million in the current year.
X-Fab Group — with its clear focus in automotive, industrial and medical applications — has transitioned X-Fab Sarawak from a manufacturing facility for commodity-type products into a high-value-added business for products with a long life cycle.
Since it became part of the X-Fab group in 2006, the site in Kuching has undergone a complete change in most of its technology portfolio, application focus, customer base, product life cycles and quality systems.
Silterra was founded in November 1995 as Wafer Technology Malaysia Sdn Bhd to promote front-end semiconductor manufacturing and a catalyst for high technology investments in Malaysia. It was renamed Silterra in December 1999.
Since its inception, Silterra has served many top-tier global fabless design and product companies covering the consumer electronics, communications and computing, and mobile device market segments.
The company is also believed to have some 20 patents under its name filed in the US.
Khazanah has reportedly been looking for a strategic partner for Silterra’s long-term growth for some time. There were plans to sell a stake in the company to a China party in 2014, but they were eventually called off.