Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba Corp will spend more than 700 billion yen ($6.6 billion) to build a new NAND flash memory factory in northern Japan.

The new plant in Iwate Prefecture will start mass production in the business year starting in April 2009, a newspaper report said.

Toshiba is the world's second-biggest maker of NAND flash memory behind South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. NAND-type flash memory is widely used for data storage in portable electronics such as Apple Inc's iPod digital media player devices. - Reuters