Hitachi Ltd is set to double its monthly production of hard disk drives for notebooks to 500,000 per month beginning in fiscal 1999, according to Japanese business daily the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The company had originally planned to boost capacity in 2000, but says continuing strong sales worldwide and double-digit growth in the market for 2.5-inch drives caused it to act sooner. Higher-than-expected sales of disk drives and external storage devices have helped somewhat in off-setting the effects of a slump in the company’s semiconductor business which will lead it to post a net loss for the year ending March (CI No 3,489). It currently holds the third position in the 2.5-inch disk drive market, behind IBM Corp and Toshiba Corp. Hitachi will spend about 4bn yen before the end of the current fiscal year to increase capacity at production facilities in both Japan and the Philippines.
