Asia's renewable energy market really seems to be booming as reports indicated (I will write an article soon about China's renewable energy market!).

The usual suspect of course is China but I saw several investment news in India last week and now this one from Japanese chemical company Tokuyama announced this week that it is building a polycrystalline silicon facility in Malaysia.

Tokuyama has decided to build a new 6,000 tons/year factory in Sarawak, Malaysia, to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar cells. Construction is scheduled to begin in early 2011, and the start of operations is scheduled for spring 2013.

The factory construction costs will be approximately ¥65 billion ($681.3m).

Tokuyama also established Tokuyama Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. to manufacture and sell the polycrystalline silicon. The company expects to hire 300 people at the time of the start-up of operations, about 280 of whom will be local.

Polycrystalline silicon, according to Tokuyama, is a fundamental material for the semiconductor industry and is used in single-crystalline silicon wafers as well as single-crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells.


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