Knox & Co. of Westport, Conn., an investment banking affiliate of Bank of Tokyo - Mitsubishi Ltd., a trusted advisor to Fujitsu, has selected Colliers International to sell the property, which includes two fab buildings, one 510,000 sf and the other 238,000 sf, two utility buildings totaling about 80,000 sf and 75 acres of raw land available for development. Paul Breuer of Colliers is the Portland-area point man for the leasing team, which includes Steve Rothrock and others from the company's corporate property services division in Seattle.

Unlike some of the other firms vying for the leasing assignment who offered to sell the real estate if someone else sold off the chip making tools that were in it, Breuer says Colliers lobbied that the plant should be sold as the ready-to-run chip fabrication plant that it is. "We told them if you have to unhook it, pick it up, move it and hook it back up and make it work, all of that relocation cost is lost and the plant itself would be very difficult to retrofit for another purpose," says Breuer. "On the other hand, a user could go in and in very short order have that state-of-the art facility up and running rather than having to wait three years while a new plant is developed."

Established in October 1988, the Gresham plant (21015 SE Stark St.) was Fujitsu's first overseas wafer fabrication facility and one of its key production bases for memory products. In April 2000, the company spent $350 million converting all production lines to flash memory -- used for cell phones and other handheld electronic devices -- but because of the downturn it has been running at well below capacity. Fujitsu last August tried to get AMD to buy a 50% share of the Gresham plant, but the deal fell through.