Yet on Friday, the Boise-based company was busy celebrating the $250 million, 265,000-square-foot expansion of its chip-making facilities in Singapore.

To borrow from the Realtor's handbook: It's all about location, location, location.

Micron has kept the Lehi facility in a holding pattern ever since cutting back its Utah hiring plans with the chip market slide of the late 1990s. Only significant improvements in the domestic chip market, the company has maintained, can resurrect the Lehi plant's once-golden future.

But it is the overseas market for DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips, particularly in Asia and among Pacific Rim companies, that is growing, Micron officials said Friday.

"We need operations in close proximity to our customers, and the Singapore operation is perfectly located to help us achieve this goal," Micron spokesman Mike Reynoldson said. "This expansion will support Micron's assembly and test needs in Asia for the next four to five years."

The Singapore plant, now 40 percent larger with the expansion, packages and tests memory components and ships to clients throughout Asia. Its work force is 3,000 strong and growing. By contrast, Micron's 2,100-acre, 12-building campus along Utah County's Traverse Ridge employs 500-600 memory product testers - about one-tenth the work force predicted when the company broke ground on the plant in 1995.

While the Singapore operation focuses entirely on assembly and testing, the Lehi plant is designed to be a complete chip-manufacturing facility, from initial fabrication through testing and distribution.

Micron would not say what specifically would trigger a full mobilization of the Lehi operations, though CEO Steve Appleton has recently noted modest improvement in the memory markets.

Micron has slipped to No. 3 worldwide in chip sales, and in June reported its largest quarterly loss in two years. The company blamed a sharp fall in memory chip prices due to a global supply glut.

"It's all about market conditions, and that's the same whether we're talking about Idaho, Virginia or Utah, all places [in the U.S.] where we have manufacturing facilities."

The Singapore expansion, Reynoldson stressed, "really relates to being close as we can to our customers."

For Lehi and Utah County, that means Micron's current skeletal operations will remain the status quo.

Lehi Mayor Kenneth Greenwood and City Administrator Ed Collins did not immediately return calls Friday to say how they felt about that.

However, investors gave the move a modest nod: Micron's shares closed Friday at $12.49, up 9 cents.

bmims@sltrib.com