Sanyo boosts DVD optical pickup production
The Japanese company plans to increase its production capacity for DVD recordable optical pickups from 1.6 million units in FY 2002 (ended March 2003) to 15 million units in FY 2003 (ending March 2004). A further increase to 35 million units will be implemented in FY 2004.
Also in FY 2004, the company will begin production of optical pickups for AV use, an application in which conventional VCRs are replaced by units containing both hard-disk drives (HDD) and recordable DVDs. Digital TV programming is recorded onto the HDD, and can be archived using the DVD recorder.
Sanyo estimates that the total market for DVD recorders will increase from 5.5 million units in FY 2002 to 30 million units in FY 2003 and will reach 66 million units in FY 2004.
Both Rohm and Mitsubishi Electric have announced plans to increase their production of lasers for recordable DVD drives.
Sanyo claims to have an industry-leading 40% share of the optical pickup market; this figure includes all the various CD and DV formats but excludes Mini Disks, magneto-optical (MO) disks and CD video games. The company says that it produced 163 million optical pickups in FY 2002, and projects that production volumes will increase to 200 million units in FY 2003 and 250 million units in FY 2004.
The company also says that its plans to “continue and further develop [its] core competency in blue-violet laser technology for the next generation of high storage capacity discs.”
