Toshiba announced today that they would increase their spending on semiconductors by 13 percent for the current business year. This will accelerate their output of flash memory chips. The increased demand for flash memory is at past partially attributed to the recently released iPod Shuffle from Apple.
According to Masashi Muromachi, Toshiba's Corporate Vice President, "demand create by this new machine [iPod Shuffle] is so vast that our current capacity can in no way meet their [Apple's] needs."
Apple's iPod Shuffle was released on Jan 11th, 2005.