Toshiba Sandisk Joint Production

Good news for everyone. Toshiba and Sandisk plan to jointly spend about $5.2 billion to build a new flash memory plant in Japan. This is to face the production of rival Samsung head on. The two will build build a NAND-type flash memory factory in Iwate prefecture in northern Japan.

If you do not know what's its implications, well let me tell you. More flash memory supply (the ones in thumbdrive, sd card, memory card, your MP3 player, cameras, etc.) would lower the price of gadgets that uses flash memory. Notice the low price of flash USB drives nowadays. Notice the proliferation of MP3 players here in the Philippines. So, this is good news to us all consumers.

The bad news is, operation and production of this Toshiba-Sandisk project will bear flash, err, fruit come 2008.