Hitachi Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. finalized and signed on Thursday an agreement to establish a joint venture semiconductor company next April that will focus on system LSI (large-scale integration) chips, they said.
This announcement culminates discussions that began when a basic agreement was singed on October regarding the separation of each company's semiconductor business and the establishment of Renesas Technology Corp., they said in a statement.
Hitachi and Mitsubishi, both based in Tokyo, plan to seek approval for this reorganization of their chip businesses at extraordinary shareholder meetings on Feb. 6 next year, they said.
The two companies also proposed top management for Renesas Technology. Mitsubishi Electric's Koichi Nagasawa [cq] was named as Renesas Technology's chairman and chief executive officer and Hitachi's Satoru Ito [cq] will be the president and chief operating officer.
For sales activities in Japan, they will establish Renesas Technology Sales Co. Ltd. on April 1, and for overseas, the two companies plan to merge each company's system LSI sales activities of Europe, the U.S. and Asia in the first half of fiscal 2003, they said.
