South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Wednesday unveiled a plan to become the world's top chipmaker in 10 years through aggressive investment in next-generation products.
Its president Kim Jong-Kap said separately that several companies have expressed interest in buying a 36 percent stake currently still held by the creditors who bailed it out in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian crisis.
Hynix, now the world's fifth largest memory chipmaker, said in a statement it would boost sales from last year's 7.7 billion dollars to 18 billion dollars by 2010 and to 25 billion dollars by 2012.
The company said it would invest a tenth of its entire revenue in research and development while continuing to build and upgrade production lines.
It aims to produce a next-generation memory chip called Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM) by 2009. Industry analysts expect it to become the main memory device, replacing high-density flash memories, within the next decade.
Hynix is South Korea's ninth most valuable company with a market capitalisation of around 17.66 trillion won (19.3 billion dollars).