April 18, 2007 – After calling off its pursuit of Taiwan packaging house Advanced Semiconductor Engineering over purchase price haggling, US private equity firm Carlyle Group is taking a 15% stake in Nakaya Microdevices Corp., a Japanese chip assembly and test house, according to local newspaper reports.

Carlyle reportedly will invest 1.5 billion yen (US $12.6 million) for private placement of Nakaya shares. The backend services firm increases its capital base and ability to expand its business to better compete with competitors in Asia. “Using Carlyle’s advice, we want to capture 10% of the (400-500 billion yen) [$3.35-$4.19 billion] semiconductor post-processing market,” president Yoshifumi Nakaya said, quoted by the papers.

Carlyle, which reportedly would seek to recoup its investment through an IPO in five years, gains another inroad into the semiconductor industry, where it has already participated in a number of buyouts, including Freescale, Jazz Semiconductor, AZ Electronics, and Toshiba Ceramics.

Nakaya, which counts Toshiba and its LSI Package Solutions subsidiary as its main customers, posted FY06 sales (ended in March) of about 7.3 billion yen ($61.2 million).