Denso, one of the world’s top automotive semiconductor manufacturers and a key supplier to Toyota, might consider spinning off its chip business, which generates around 420 billion yen ($3.1 billion) in sales, the company’s chief technology officer said.
Denso ranks second on the Top 100 suppliers list and has also quietly built up a presence in automotive chips.
Now, with semiconductor-related capital expenditures totaling around 160 billion yen over the past three years, Denso ranks as the world’s fifth-largest supplier of automotive chips by sales.
"We need to think about whether the time will come when we sell semiconductors, alone, externally," CTO Yoshifumi Kato said in an interview at Denso's headquarters in Aichi prefecture on Friday. "It's worth looking into whether that kind of structure is possible," he said.
Today, the semiconductors Denso makes in-house go into automotive parts that it then sells to carmakers or other suppliers. Whe…