Kingston seeks stake in SATA Specialist JMicron

JMicron will host a special investors meeting on January 25 to pass the company's proposal to raise new funds via a private placement.

The sources revealed that JMicron had intended to draw investment from Toshiba, but gave up partly due to concerns that relationships with other chip sources could be affected.

Kingston has become more aggressive in the SSD field since 2010, the sources pointed out. The company's successful push of low-priced SSD series earlier last year helped it further penetrate into the market, the sources said. Later in 2010, Kingston expanded its line of SSD with 64-512GB products.

In the second half of 2010, Kingston started to use JMicron's storage controllers in its SSD series, the sources indicated. Cooperation between the two has been growing since.

The sources estimated that JMicron's SSD controller shipments for 2010 totaled more than one million units. Kingston accounted for over 30% to the output, the sources said.

Kingston also holds stakes in controller design firms Phison Electronics, Skymedi and Solid State System (3S). Kingston works with Phison for eMMC solutions, and the other two for flash drives and cards. JMicron is part of the United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) Group and led by Tsai Ming-Kai, who is also the chairman of MediaTek.