Mitsubishi Corp. to Manufacture VCRs in County
Mitsubishi Corp. will begin assembling videocassette recorders later this year or early in 1987 at the Santa Ana plant where its subsidiary now makes televisions, a company spokeswoman said Thursday.
The decision makes Mitsubishi the third company--all Japanese--to announce plans for VCR production in the United States. It is the second, along with Hitachi Ltd., to earmark Orange County for its plant. VCRs are now made only in Japan and Korea.
“We can’t say what the numbers will be or when we will start,” said Evette Caceres, national advertising and public relations manager for Mitsubishi Electric Sales of America Inc. in Cypress. “Probably early next year would be the soonest we could start producing. We have to study the situation first.”
A Reuters news service report out of Tokyo on Wednesday said Mitsubishi plans to assemble 40,000 VCRs a month at the Santa Ana plant of Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics of America Inc. sometime this fall. The report said most of the television manufacturing now in Santa Ana will be switched to a new plant about 40 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Caceres said, however, that executives in America could not confirm the production figures in the Reuters report and could not say how many jobs might be created or eliminated. She said the Georgia plant is expected to start operating this fall.
Caceres could not explain why Mitsubishi was opening an assembly operation in the United States, and Mitsubishi officials in Tokyo could not be reached for comment Thursday.
But competitors Hitachi and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. have said they will open VCR production facilities in the United States to ease trade tensions and to take advantage of the rising value of the yen and declining value of the dollar.
VCRs have become a major component in the important consumer electronics market and in the trade deficit.
Of the $50-billion trade deficit with Japan last year, more than 18% of it, or $9.3 billion, was in consumer electronics, said Allan Schlosser, a vice president of the Electronic Industries Assn., a Washington, D.C., manufacturers trade group. Overall electronics accounted for $16 billion, or 32%, of the total trade deficit, he said.
“About $5.5 billion worth of TVs are expected to be sold in America by manufacturers this year,” Schlosser said. About $5 billion worth of VCRs should be sold out of the factory this year.”
He said VCRs are now in about 30% of American households and will go into about 10% more each year for the foreseeable future. Nearly 11.9 million units were sold last year and 12.5 million are expected to be sold this year, he said.
Hitachi, through its Anaheim subsidiary, Hitachi Consumer Products of America, said it will start assembling 100,000 VCRs a year in June at its Anaheim plant. The company expects to produce 500,000 to 600,000 units a year in four to five years.
Matsushita, the largest VCR maker worldwide, said last summer that it plans to make VCRs in the United States through its Secaucus, N.J., subsidiary, Matsushita Electric Corp. of America. Matsushita, which manufactures under the Panasonic and Quasar labels and supplies the electronic hardware for General Electric, Magnavox and other brands, has not yet found a site for a new VCR plant. Its start-up production is expected to be 50,000 units a month, a spokesman said.
