Samsung Electronics says undecided on further investment in its China NAND plant

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Friday that it has not decided on additional investment in a second memory chip production line in the Chinese city of Xian, denying a report by China's official Xinhua news agency.

Xinhua earlier on Friday had quoted the company's vice president Ji Hyun-ki as saying that the group would spend more than $14 billion in the second phase of investment in its memory chip plant in Xian.

In 2017, the world's top memory chip maker announced that it would invest $7 billion over the next three years in its Xian plant that produces NAND flash memory chips.

"The second-phase amount of investment in the second production line has not been decided and will depend on market conditions," the South Korean tech giant said in a statement to Reuters, in response to the Xinhua report.

Samsung posted its weakest profit in more than two years in the first quarter, hit by falls in chip prices.

Many NAND chip suppliers that have seen big price falls since last year are slowing expansion plans and have declared reductions in production to curtail supply, tech research firm TrendForce said in a report earlier this month.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park; Writing by Lee Chyen Yee; Editing by Susan Fenton and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)