Hynix board to discuss company breakup

The never-ending story...

The board of Hynix Semiconductor will meet tomorrow to discuss splitting the company up to appease its angry creditors. The creditors have refused to supply the company with more funding following is massive losses of $3.9bn last year, which has forced Hynix to sell assets. The company owes over $5bn and last week its money lenders demanded that the company's board divide the business into saleable pieces or hand the reins over to the creditors. The creditors own around $2.36bn in convertible bonds which they could convert into shares that would give them control of 75 per cent of the business. Hynix should be broken into memory and non-memory semiconductor businesses plus other operations including its thin film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) unit, used in flat-screen computers, the creditors stated. Creditors of the company have been up in arms since the directors at Hynix turned down a proposal to sell the main parts of the firm to Micron Technology for $3.4bn last week. The deal between Hynix and Micron had been on the cards for some time after it became apparent that without a buyout, Hynix would not survive for long. Hynix's board then decided to sell the non-memory part of the company to raise funds rather than sell its lucrative memory semiconductor unit that raised 70 per cent of total company revenues for 2001.