Mitsubishi Chemical......................
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19970802
Mitsubishi Chemical to build $40m plant
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By Jennifer Lien
This will bring MCC's fixed asset investment in S'pore to $560m
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JAPAN's Mitsubishi Chemical Corp (MCC) is investing $40 million to build an organic photo conductor (OPC) plant here.
Company officials revealed this at the opening of Mitsubishi Chemical Infonics' $450 million disk plant yesterday.
The new investment will bring MCC's fixed asset investment in Singapore to $560 million. Mitsubishi Chemical Infonics (MCI), a wholly-owned MCC subsidiary, also has a $70 million CD-Recordable (CD-R) plant here.
The three facilities are located in Tuas.
OPCs are a key component of toner cartridges used in photocopiers and laser printers. The new OPC plant will start production in May next year with an initial capacity of 270,000 units monthly. This will eventually be boosted to 600,000 units a month.
Output from the plant will be supplied to customers such as Xerox, Sharp and Minolta and will mostly be used to make laser printer toners. MCC also makes OPCs in Japan and the US.
The disk plant opened yesterday comprises a $250 million disk media section and a $200 million section making CD-R and CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) disks.
It employs some 400 people, including 50-60 research and development engineers.
CD-R disks are used to record information only once, and they sell for US$3 (S$4.40) to US$5 each. CD-RW disks can record information repeatedly and sell for about 10 times the price of CD-Rs. Disk media are the disks found in a hard disk drive.
MCI currently has an annual capacity of 32 million CD-Rs, 1.4 million CD-RWs and 12 million hard disks in Singapore. By 1999, this will be boosted to 40 million, 23 million and 35 million respectively. There are also plans to start production of digital video disks (DVDs) in the facility next year.
Most of MCI's disk media output is shipped to Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics, which makes all of Quantum Corp's disk drives. Its CD-Rs are mostly shipped to MCC unit Verbatim.
The company has a 9-10 per cent share of the world disk media market, a 9 per cent share of the CD-R market and about half of the CD-RW market. In two years, the company hopes to boost its share of both the disk media and CD-R markets to over 20 per cent.
On the outlook for the disk media market, Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, general manager of MCI's information storage products department, said MCI expects over 20 per cent growth in shipments this year due to its strong customer partnerships.
Other media makers, notably Komag Inc, have stumbled recently in the light of weak orders from market leader Seagate Technology.
The CD-R market is expected to grow over 160 per cent to 600 million units by the year 2000, while the CD-RW market should grow from the current one million to 100 million-150 million units by then. |
