Two high-tech companies have decided to set up operations in Wuxi, Jiangsu province.

The US-based circuit protection products company Littelfuse is to consolidate its Taiwan wafer fabrication facility into Wuxi. The Taiwan plant was acquired as part of Littlefuse’s acquisition of Concord Semiconductor in 2006 and the move is part of a global consolidation and job reduction exercise. These restructuring activities are expected to be fully complete by the end of 2010 and will realise savings of about US$7m a year. Across its worldwide operations, the company is looking to reduce the number of its sites, shift activities to low-cost locations and move to a leaner and flatter organisational structure.

Meanwhile, the Korean semiconductor company Hynix has announced plans to build a semiconductor back-end joint venture in Wuxi with Wuxi Industrial Development Group.

In 2005, Hynix established a joint venture, Hynix-Numonyx Semiconductor, with STMicroelectronics. With the founding of the back-end plant in Wuxi, Hynix will have a complete product range from front-end to back-end facilities in China, which is expected to yield significant production and distribution cost savings.

Hynix Semiconductor is one of the world’s leading memory semiconductor manufacturers, supplying dynamic random access memory chips, flash memory chips and CMOS image sensors.