14 DAY TRIAL // Plextor announced that it officially transferred its optical drives manufacturing business to its parent company, the Japanese industrial group Shinano Kenshi and while the sales of Plextor branded products and devices will continue for the time being, the looming reorganization is expected to pose a series of delays and changes in the products release and design approaches.
Plextor's parent company decided to take over the manufacturing facilities, product planning, development and design of optical drives as well as over the sales and customer support departments as a part of a plan that requires the entire company to streamline its operations. While it is not known what will be the effects of this merging in the long run, all Plextor branded optical drives and related products that are now on the market will continue to be built and shipped for the immediate future. Sometime ago Plextor announced that as part of the reorganization process, the optical drive business will see some cuts as the company expects to concentrate itself more on the industrial equipment business and on the Plextalk digital sound recording playback equipment for blind. According to the news site xbitlabs, the optical disk drives, ODDs for short, will be reduced to a mere "10% of the peak production levels".
"This announcement by Shinano Kenshi will have no material affect on the operations of Plextor LLC, as we already completed a corporate reorganization in North and South America last year. Our business will continue as usual," said Toru Nakazawa, president of Plextor LLC, USA. Because of higher manufacturing costs in Japan, most hardware manufacturers that are active on the optical disk drives business are going to transfer most of their manufacturing capabilities in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, or outsource their products to a number of contract manufacturers.
Among the companies that are preferring to build their products in other countries there are the giants Sony and Samsung but a number of other hardware and general electronics providers like Matsushita and Pioneer are using contract manufacturers like Foxconn Electronics and Asustek Computer in order to build DVD burner drives, keeping only the production of high-end models in-house. As the entire optical disk drive business and market is highly volatile a number of joint ventures appeared like the Sony and NEC one which is used to develop, design and produce ODDs, while the competing companies LG Electronics and Hitachi are forming their own venture.