Japanese DVD drive makers outsource to Taiwan ahead of schedule

More and more leading Japanese
DVD drive manufacturers like Sony and Teac have speeded up outsourcing 4x
DVD+RW drives to Taiwan. This trend is a result of the recent steep price
falls
 (prices for 4x DVD+RW drives have fallen by 40%-50% over the past
three months). According to the article the contract orders came much earlier than expected. Taiwanese companies had
expected that Japanese vendors would start releasing orders to Taiwan in the
first or second quarter of next year:


The Taiwan-based Commercial Times reported that BenQ
shipped about 150,000 DVD drives, including slim-type models for
notebooks, to Teac from its plant in China in November. Monthly shipments
could increase to 350,000 units in 2004, the paper said. Another Taiwanese
maker Accesstek, an affiliate of Micro-Star International (MSI), is making
DVD-duals for Sony, the report added.

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However, both BenQ and Accesstek declined to comment on the
report.


According to TSR (Japan), Sony is the world's third largest
DVD drive vendor, with a 13% share of global market in the first three
quarters of this year and trailing after only NEC and Pioneer.


But Teac and Sony may now find competing with NEC and Pioneer
more difficult as the leaders have both expanded their monthly output of
DVD drives to between 800,000 and one million units from the previous
300,000-400,000 units, Taiwanese makers
said.

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Source: DigiTimes

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