SK Hynix may gobble up entire Toshiba flash division

As we've been reporting about for a couple of weeks, Toshiba is in a lot of trouble as multi-billion dollar writedowns on its US nuclear business threaten to bankrupt the company. Earlier this month the company confessed the losses were even bigger than expected and the firm is rushing to sell pieces of itself to get its house back in order.

Initially, Toshiba aimed to sell less than 20 percent of its semiconductor unit, which includes the lucrative flash division, but now the company is considering to sell a majority stake or perhaps even the entire division.

In the news today is a statement from SK Hynix CEO Park Sung-wook that his company is interested in making a fresh bid if Toshiba puts more on the table:

SK Hynix CEO and vice chairman Park Sung-wook told reporters on the sidelines of a semiconductor conference in Seoul that if Toshiba puts forward a specific offer and schedule it will consider taking them.

Park declined to comment on whether acquiring the Japanese business unit will help profits or if it was willing to spend more than the 10 trillion won, or $8.8 billion, that Toshiba was aiming to raise from the sale.

Samsung is the largest player in the NAND flash memory market with a marketshare of 36.6 percent. Toshiba is the second largest player with 19.8 percent of the market and Western Digital takes the third place with 17.1 percent thanks to its acquisition of SanDisk.

SK Hynix comes in fourth with a marketshare of 10.4 percent so if the company succeeds in buying Toshiba's flash unit it can become world's second largest player in the flash market.