Taiwanese Disc Manufacturers Delay Annual Maintenance

[Ian]

I'm sure dolph is just gonna love this...

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20051229A6024.html

Leading manufacturers of optical discs in Taiwan, in light of growing global demand for DVD+R/-R discs, plan to forego or delay annual maintenance of production equipment originally scheduled for the first quarter of 2006, according to industry sources.

Since the first quarter is traditionally an off-season period, makers usually stop production lines to service equipment, the sources indicated. An unexpected boom in orders for DVD+R/-R discs almost booked up production capacities for the first quarter of 2006 and makers will continue production to meet the demand, the sources said.

Makers are unwilling or unable to expand production capacity of DVD+R/-R discs due to previous problems with oversupply from general expansion as well as tight availability of funds and may give up or reschedule regular maintenance as an alternative, the sources pointed out.

Hmm.. Taiwanese manufacturers won't invest any more money to expand production lines and now they won't do maintenance on their existing lines. Are they planning to just run them into the ground in the hope that recordable BD/HD discs will take off?

[dolphinius_rex]

Well, I believe the part about tight funds.... let's take a look:

Ritek and CMC owe millions in bank loans
Optodisc was massively in debt causing a merger failure, and was just recently all but purchased by a Japanese company
Prodisc is even worse of then Optodisc!
Nanya has quit making media

I don't think Princo or MBIL are doing any better either!

MCC/Verbatim is probably fine but only on account of the fact that they sell technology, and do manufacturing on the side


So what does this mean for us, the consumer? potentially even lower grade crap... (woohoo!) oh, and maybe price increases too (why not?)

[dolphinius_rex]

I would just like to say that despite Digitimes' spin-doctoring, manufacturing plants do NOT only do maintenance once a year. This article is simply referring to the big major maintenance often done at the beginning of a new year, where the plant shuts down 100%. Stuff is still done on an ongoing basis during the year, sometimes even DAILY.