Sanyo raises digital camera output target
By Reuters
December 26, 2002, 10:30 AM PT
Sanyo Electric, the world's largest digital camera maker, said Thursday it has raised its output target for the first three months of 2003 to 6.5 million units from 6 million as market growth continued to outpace expectations.
Strong sales of digital cameras and photo-taking cell phones also helped Sanyo's U.S. sales during the holiday shopping season pull even with last year's, despite worries over weakening consumer spending, Sanyo President Yukinori Kuwano said.
"Our results for the third quarter (October-December) weren't too bad, I think," he said in an interview. "The main bright spot for us now is camera-equipped cell phones."
Kuwano added he was confident the company would hit its target to sell 8.4 million cell phones in the business year to next March, up from last year's 5.7 million units.
Several analysts doubt the company can meet its ambitious cell phone target, which includes a more than 50 percent increase in handset revenues in the second half of this business year from the first half's $776 million.
Last month, the company unveiled a restructuring scheme that will shift production of air conditioners and other goods overseas and reassign 1,400 home appliance division workers to other areas.
"We're still in the process of implementing it, but during the second half we aim to put a structure in place (in the home appliance division) that will be able to break even," he said.
He added that Sanyo's strength in color-screen and camera-equipped cell phones, as well as key components, would help fuel growth in handset sales.
Sanyo is the world's largest maker of cell phone batteries and a major supplier of small, low-power color displays and charge-coupled devices, the "electronic film" of digital image-taking devices.
"Batteries are doing well and we're improving market share," Kuwano said.
The company's new target for digital camera output would mark a hefty 44 percent rise from 2001/02, while a further gain of more than 50 percent, to 10 million units, is targeted for next year as it expands production in China and Indonesia.
Although Sanyo claims a 30 percent share of the world's digital camera market, it does not make its own lenses and supplies more than 90 percent of its output to other companies such as Olympus Optical on an original equipment manufacturing basis, rather than selling under its own brand.
Kuwano said he had no plans to change that strategy.
"We get considerable benefits from high-volume production," he said. |
