PC Peripherals Sony & NEC decide to merge optical storage divisions

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Chaos

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Japanese electronics makers Sony Corp. and NEC Corp. said on Thursday they had agreed to set up a joint venture for optical disk drives, aiming to better weather intense price competition.
Sony and NEC will transfer their optical drive businesses to a new entity due to start operations on April 1. Sony will hold a 55 percent stake in the venture, which will design and make DVD and CD drives for personal computers and other products.
Combined revenues of the two firms' optical disk drive businesses came to about 220 billion yen ($1.85 billion) in the business year ended in March. NEC is the smaller partner with about 70 to 80 billion yen in sales.

The venture will control some 20 percent of the global market, second only to Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS), a venture between Japan's Hitachi Ltd. and South Korea's LG Electronics Inc., an NEC spokesman said.

"The market is growing quite strongly, but competition is tough and prices are falling rapidly. We decided to join forces with Sony to strengthen our operations," the NEC spokesman said.
A Hitachi spokesman estimated that HLDS controlled about 28 percent of the global optical disk market, which was poised to expand to about 271 million units in 2005, a rise of some 8 percent from 250 million units last year.

Sony and NEC said the venture would combine NEC's LSI technology with Sony's expertise in optical pickups. They hope to expand sales and take the top spot from Hitachi-LG.

NEC would not disclose whether its optical disk business was profitable. Sony said its operations were profitable.

The move comes as the latest consolidation in the industry. South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. formed a joint venture for their optical disk operations in 2003.
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Source:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1888466,00.asp
Looks like we'll be getting NEC drives rebadged as Sony in India soon :)
 
Chaos said:
Source:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1888466,00.asp
Looks like we'll be getting NEC drives rebadged as Sony in India soon :)
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This merge creates the dual benefits of combined R&D which may translate into better costs and better quality/technology for us.....faster...
They may follow the individual branding thingy though....if only to retain brand rep shoppers....and a certain amount of variety...

I think the HP/Compaq merger awhile back was also a very positive step......besides customers.....stockholders also got their share of the cake :ohyeah: .....The very volatile IT segment could do with some more mergers..... I had given up investments in the hardware IT sector which is more or less equatable....but now.....;)
Here's to hoping their display and memory (flash etc) segments also hook up!!!
 
^Lite-On are getting screwed over though. Serves them right.. it's good that the Japanese drive manufacturers are getting together.
 
TechHead said:
^Lite-On are getting screwed over though. Serves them right.. it's good that the Japanese drive manufacturers are getting together.
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hee hee...serves em right....loads of these cheaper drives fail...that's why I only buy Sony, plextor, pioneer, asus, msi etc...LG used to be very good upto their 32x cdrw's....

Oh and abt your sig very cool advice though replace the word "computer" with "rig"....the words rig and sig will sound poetic together.....;)
 
^ You missed Yamaha! Their CD-RW drives were among the best ones. It's a
pity they didn't participate in DVD-RW market.

[Slightly off-topic]
Can anyone tell me where to find Pionner and/or NEC DVD writers in Delhi?
I'm planning to get a Pioneer DVR-110 drive for myself in next two weeks.
[/Slightly off-topic]
 
Yamaraj said:
^ You missed Yamaha! Their CD-RW drives were among the best ones. It's a
pity they didn't participate in DVD-RW market.

[Slightly off-topic]
Can anyone tell me where to find Pionner and/or NEC DVD writers in Delhi?
I'm planning to get a Pioneer DVR-110 drive for myself in next two weeks.
[/Slightly off-topic]
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Yamaha CD/RW's were real speed demons.....I remember their 12x ones....but unfortunately....they were very costly....I remember buying a CDRW some years back for 11 thousand.....man they were luxury items then......but defending their price.....I have a simple 32x 3 year old LG that cost me around 5-6K....but has burned more than 2500 CD's........ it has a ROI of more than 50x.......

Today an LG CDRW will last u about as long as a mobike gear oil change......ie 6 months (Now b4 anyone comments, I mean with the kind of writing that my business in Jabalpur does).....

Pioneer should have an outlet in Delhi......ditto NEC (at least their distributors..).....though I'm not familiar with delhi except palika and N.P......;)

What about a pioneer music showroom....they may have some leads....maybe worth checking out....and ofcourse the good ol' www........:P
 
Well vandal dude, its nice to see an attitude change and you posting something constructive! Good going. NEC has a disty in mumbai but don't bother asking them the price... It won't be worth it. Just get a benq or sony 810A.

EDIT: While you might think that the HP+Compaq merger was constructive, the employees of HP feel exactly the opposite ;)
 
Yeah.... Compaq was merely a desktop computer vendor (a business which IBM wisely decided to get out of).... HP is much more.

Actually, there was only one reason I would ever take over Compaq - they had bought out DEC. Unfortunately HP in all its wisdom scrapped the Alpha... god alone knows what possessed them to do that. Do you know that even thought it has been over two (three?) years since the alpha was scrapped, it still outperforms a lot of today's stuff?

Back on topic, whatever happened to LiteON? They used to make good cdrw b4, so how come they screwed this up so bad?
 
[OT]
Alpha wasn't shredded to bits. Intel-HP joint production of Itanium processors
should give you a clue. ;) A lot of Alpha technology went straight into Itanium.
[/OT]
 
[OT]

I know why they cancelled alpha...

And how on earth can you say that Alpha technology went into Itanium? I never heard anything like that. From what I studied, there wasn't one iota of RISC in Itanium, not even as much as in the current CISC stuff.... except maybe for superscalar thingys...

[/OT]
 
^
[OT - A lot, I know ;)]
Sorry, it's old news: http://appserv.gcn.com/state/7_8/tech-report/16692-1.html
Compaq Computer Corp. will phase out the 64-bit Alpha processor line that it inherited in 1998 from Digital Equipment Corp.

Over the next few years, Compaq will merge its Alpha technology into Intel 64-bit Itanium processors, Compaq and Intel officials said recently.

But the Alpha chip won’t vanish immediately, said Ty Rabe, Compaq’s director of high-performance and technical computing solutions.

The company will license Alpha technology to Intel and will base all its servers on the Intel architecture by 2004. By 2005, a high-end Itanium processor that borrows from Alpha will perform better than either processor separately, said Rabe, a former Digital executive.
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See this:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-268986.html
Shannon expects "there will be a lot of Alpha technology incorporated into (Intel's Itanium) designs." He speculates that Alpha's "glueless SMP" and EV8's SMT, or simultaneous multi-threading technologies, would make their way into future Itanium chips.
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As far as your comments on RISC, CISC and Itanium are concered ...well,
you're right in saying that Itanium is quite different from Alpha. Itanium is
based on EPIC architecture, while Alpha was RISC. Still, HP integrated a lot
of other elements of their PA-RISC design into that of Itanium. And rumor
has it that Distributed Memory Controllers from Alpha EV8 and EV9 will be
integrated back into Itanium's future revisions, replacing Rambus with DDR2
or better.
[/OT]
 
Chaos said:
EDIT: While you might think that the HP+Compaq merger was constructive, the employees of HP feel exactly the opposite ;)
Click to expand...

Well employees to my limited experience in general dislike any sort of change, especially the lower and mid tier guys.....mainly cause they cannot see beyond their own noses........
Its a psychological thing, they feel threatened and all, and will misinterpret something and cause probs...

One of the majot probs of being a manager/mgmt. faces is actually getting these guys to get over any such feelings....

regards the HP compaq thing they were mainly afraid of getting redundant.....which is always a factor in mergers.....fat shedding is necessary.... but due to the diverse prod. portfolios this didn't really cause them a prob...

I had a case study of the HP compaq merger in my CFA lvl 2 in 2003......so I have a few financial & other facts with me....

And thanks for the praise for my posting......u guys have made me feel @ home after the bad start....... And thanks for not being a first impression type man.....
 
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