The Taiwanese vernacular IT daily Digitimes quoted The Liberty Times of Taiwan as saying that Hon Hai and TSMC have formed a consortium to join the takeover bid for Toshiba’s NAND flash memory chip business unit.

The daily said the move represents the two Taiwanese companies’ concerted efforts  to beat out world memory chip market leader Samsung Electronics.

Foxconn has been showing great interests in taking over Toshiba’s chip unit, since Toshiba opened the takeover bid, but industry analysts question the Taiwan company’s ability to raise big enough money to acquire Toshiba. Foxconn has a cash reserve of 1.3 billion yen.

Toshiba plans to sell half, or a 100% share of its chip business which estimates up to maximum 2.5 billion yen. The selloff is to raise money to write off US$7 billion losses incurred at its nuclear power plant business.

Toshiba is world’s second largest NAND flash memory chip maker.

NAND flash memory is a type of non-volatile storage technology that does not require power to retain data.