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The South Korean gonverment said on Wednesday it had approved a plan by Samsung to build a flash memory chip plant in China seen costing some $4 billion.

The will produce NAND flash memory chips based on 10- nanometer class technology, the S. Korean economy ministry said Wednesday.

Samsung plans to begin the factory' s operation in the second half of next year.

The plant will be able to produce 100,000 wafers of 12-inch size per month. Samsung began operating its latest factory in South Korea from September last year to mass produce 20-nano NAND flash memory chips.

According to Gartner, global demand for NAND flash memory chips was expected to surge to 35.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 from 20.6 billion dollars in 2010, with China's portion of the global demand set to grow from 43 percent in 2010 to 55 percent in 2015.

Samsung is the world's biggest NAND flash memory maker with around 40 percent of the market. It competes with Japan's Toshiba, Hynix Semiconductor and Micron Technology.