Fujitsu is to invest $477m in new hard-disk drive manufacturing plants in Thailand in order to increase its Thai production capacity to three millions drives a month, generating sales of $2.1bn a year, by 2001. It is the year’s biggest investment in the Thai electronics industry. It will be Fujitsu’s largest disk-making venture in the Asia Pacific region and is a key part of its strategy to become an international leader in the disk-drive industry. It will also make it Thailand’s largest producer and exporter of disk drives ahead of Seagate Technology (Thailand), which has a combined production capacity of 23.8 million hard-disk drives a year and IBM Storage Products (Thailand) which makes 19 million. The three companies between them have exported about $5bn-worth of disk-drives this year, or about 10% of Thailand’s total exports. Masao Suzuki, managing director of Fujitsu (Thailand), told the local press the company decided to expand production facilities in Thailand to boost its share in the global market. Fujitsu hopes to capture around 20% of the worldwide market as compared to its current 9%. Seagate is the world’s largest hard-disk drive producer with a 23% market share follow by Quantum at 20%, Western Digital with 19%, and IBM with 11%. The first phase of expansion, which will bring capacity to two million units a month, will be completed by the end of next year. The second phase, raising monthly production to three million, is expected to be on stream in early 2001. The new plants will be located at Navanakorn Industrial Estate, Pathum Thani province, adjacent to existing facilities which are also undergoing expansion. The company’s workforce will double to 18,000 when the new facilities are completed. Suzuki said Thailand was chosen as the manufacturing base because of well-constructed infrastructure for hard-disk drive production, stability of government and support from the board of investment.
