Floppy Disk Drives : Sony Broadens Rancho Bernardo Line
As part of a continuing shift of its manufacturing capacity to the United States and Tijuana, Sony said Thursday that it will begin making 3.5-inch floppy disk drives this month at its plant here. Until now, the facility has been used exclusively for color television production.
The disk drives are the second Sony product line to be added at the giant, 750,000-square-foot Rancho Bernardo plant. In February, Sony said it would introduce its 32-bit engineering work station computer to the U.S. market later this year and that all units--up to 200 per month--would be made at the Rancho Bernardo facility.
Up to now, the Japanese consumer electronics giant has been making all its small floppy disk drives at its facility in Chiba, Japan, where up to 300,000 units are turned out per month. Disk drives are used for data storage in personal computers.
Sony spokesman Koh Shimizu said Thursday that the consumer electronics giant will increase disk drive production in Rancho Bernardo gradually to about 50,000 devices per month by the end of this year. Disk drive production here will represent additional capacity and not a shift of production from Japan, he said.
Sony is currently the leading manufacturer of 3.5-inch floppy drives in the world, having developed and introduced the devices in 1980. The smaller drives are increasingly replacing 5.25-inch floppy disk drives as the most widely used memory device in personal computers. Worldwide sales of the smaller units will total about 20 million units this year, up from 12 million last year, Shimizu said.
Meanwhile, sales of 5.25-inch floppy disk drives are expected to decline this year to an estimated 8 million units, down from 13 million units last year.
Because of new automated assembly equipment and an anticipated shift of workers from the TV line, no additional hiring will be needed at Rancho Bernardo to make the disc drives and work stations. The Rancho Bernardo plant employs 1,500.
Open since 1972, Sony’s Rancho Bernardo facility has long been the assembly plant for all of Sony’s 20-inch and 27-inch color televisions for the U.S. market. Beginning two years ago, Sony moved production of its 13-inch sets from Japan to a new 300,000-square-foot plant in Tijuana.
