NEC, Casio And Hitachi To Form New JV Company

The mobile terminal business is in for a shake-up. With effect from May 1, 2010, a new company is coming into existence. This company is called NEC Casio Mobile Communications Ltd (NCMCL).

The new company will have its headquarters in Kawasaki City in the Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan, and will be housed in the NEC Tamagawa plant. The company will begin its innings with a capital of JPY 1 billion. The shareholding pattern of the investors in the new company is as follows: NEC – 66%, Casio – 17.34% and Hitachi – 16.66%. By the end of June 2010, one round of capital increase will take place, through which the new capital will become JPY 5 billion. After this increase, NEC will come to hold 70.74%.

For the JV company, NEC and NCMCL have signed a corporate spin-off contract. A merger agreement between NCMCL and Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications Co Ltd (CHMC) has been signed whereby NCMCL will completely integrate NEC’s Mobile Terminal Operations Unit with CHMC. This integration includes the unit’s sales, development, manufacturing and maintenance strengths.

Mr Koji Yamasaki, Executive GM of the Mobile Terminal Operations Unit of NEC will be the new company’s President.

Read more about the latest alignments and alliances in the mobile terminal domain, here.

NEC Electronics And Renesas Draw Timeline For Merger

NEC Electronics Corporation and Renesas Technology Corporation have announced their timeline for executing the merger between the two companies. The merged entity will come into existence on 1 April 2010 and be called as Renesas Electronics Corporation.

For the two companies, this merger is very synergistic. On the one hand, NEC specializes in semiconductor products that cover a broad range from high-end computing to broadband networking markets, customer applications, and solutions for the mobile handset, PC peripheral, automotive and digital consumer markets. On the other hand, Renesas is the world’s number one supplier of microcontrollers and a leading supplier of semiconductor system solutions provider for mobile, automotive and PC/AV markets. Both the companies have worldwide operations with thousands of employees on payroll.

All domestic sales operations (within Japan) will be merged into a single entity called Renesas Electronics Sales Co Ltd. The company has also announced the list of executives for the new entity. Mr. Junshi Yamaguchi, the President and CEO of NEC Electronics Corporation will be the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Renesas Electronics Corporation, while Mr. Yasushi Akao, President of Renesas Technology will be Director and President.

Read more about the shakeup happening in the Japanese IT industry, here.

New USB Standard Gets New Backers

Lake Forest, California-headquartered Western Digital Corporation and Kawasaki, Japan-based NEC Electronics Corporation have together announced a collaborative effort to promote the new SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 standard.

The new standard is to be used in a wide range of electronic devices including PCs, PC peripherals and digital appliances. USB 3.0 is designed to handle data transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps, which makes it ten times faster than the present USB 2.0. New, external hard disk drives have already begun to appear in the market that can leverage this level of data transfer rates.

WD and NEC have planned to jointly develop a USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) driver which can break the performance barriers of the older Bulk Only Transfer (BOT) protocol which comes with USB 2.0. The UASP driver will be used with NEC’s USB 3.0 xHCI host controller, which has already been introduced in the market.

The new UASP driver will be promoted by NEC by offering its licensing program to only those LSI vendors who commit to developing UASP-based LSI devices.

For the consumer, this can only mean better performance.

Read more about the new standards being set in the data transfer realm, here.