Tsinghua Unigroup denies reports it will buy foreign chip businesses

Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd, a high-tech company backed by Tsinghua University, said on Friday it has no plans to acquire the chip business of two leading foreign manufacturers.

The Beijing-based company denied media reports that Unigroup is in discussions with Japanese manufacturer Toshiba Corp and the United-States-based SanDisk Corp for acquisition of their flash memory chip operations.

"Currently, we have no such plans. But in the future, Unigroup's business will center around chips and cloud computing, so servers and storage services will be among our focuses," the company's public relations officer told China Daily.

China is beefing up efforts to help homegrown companies develop self-research hardware like servers and chips. Earlier, Unigroup invested $3.8 billion and acquired a 15 percent stake in Western Digital Corp, an American computer data storage company.