Japan's Toshiba said Monday it swung back to a net profit for the December quarter from a year ago on strong demand for its memory chips used in smartphones and tablet computers.

The electronics giant, whose business spans consumer electronics and nuclear power plants, revised upward its full-year earnings forecast on the back of its strong third-quarter results.

Toshiba reported a net profit of 12.4 billion yen ($151 million) in the period, reversing a net loss of 10.6 billion yen a year earlier.

The profit gain was largely due to "a significantly improved performance in electronic devices, driven mainly by the return to profit of the LCD business and demand expansion in NAND flash memories," it said in a statement.

Toshiba is the world's second largest maker of flash memory chips used to store data in hot-selling smartphones, tablet devices and various other consumer electronics, after Samsung Electronics of South Korea.

Operating profit saw 2.5-fold increase to 37.5 billion yen from 14.5 billion yen a year earlier. Sales edged up 1.6 percent to 1.6 trillion yen.

Toshiba upgraded its net profit forecast for the year to March to 100 billion yen from its earlier estimate of 70 billion yen, while downgrading its sales forecast to 6.6 trillion yen from 7.0 trillion yen projected earlier.

The firm left its operating-profit estimate unchanged at 250 billion yen.

Operating profit in the company's semiconductor business jumped to 11.6 billion yen from 4.7 billion yen a year earlier.

earlier related report

Elpida to buy Powerchip's DRAM operations: report
Tokyo (AFP) Jan 31, 2011 –

Japan's leading chip maker Elpida Memory will take over the DRAM operations of Taiwan's Powerchip Technology in a bid to increase competitiveness amid falling prices, the Nikkei said Monday.

Powerchip will end production of its own DRAM chips, used in personal computers, and will focus exclusively on production for Elpida, which plans to eventually acquire Powerchip's main production facilities, the daily said.

Falling prices of DRAM chips has accelerated the talks between the two partners, who plan to finish the negotiations by the end of March, the Nikkei said.

Elpida had a 17.4-percent share of the global DRAM market in 2009, while Powerchip held 2.1 percent, the Nikkei said.

Samsung led the market with a 33.6 percent share, followed by South Korean rival Hynix Semiconductor with 21.6 percent, the Nikkei said.

The global DRAM market came to around four trillion yen (48.7 billion dollars) in 2010, with products for PCs accounting for 80-90 percent, the Nikkei said.

— Dow Jones Newswires contributed to this article —

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