Matsushita plans $2.3B PDP fab

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 1/11/2007

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., best known by its Panasonic brand name, and diversified chemical group Toray Industries Inc. this week announced plans to spend about $2.3 billion (280 billion Japanese yen) to build a new plasma display panel (PDP) manufacturing facility in Japan.

The plant will be the fifth PDP facility of the companies' joint venture, Matsushita PDP Company Ltd. (MPDP), making it the largest PDP manufacturer in the world, according to Matsushita and Toray.

To leverage concentration of manufacturing facilities to its advantage, MPDP plans to build the new plant in Amagasaki, Japan, near the company’s existing fourth plant. The construction is scheduled to start in November, and the first phase of the production in May 2009.

With an investment of approximately $2.3 billion, the fifth plant will have a monthly production capacity of one million units -- what the companies claimed is the largest production capacity of PDP in the world. In addition, the new plant will realize as many as 10 42-inch panels, or eight 50-inch panels, from a single sheet of glass, the companies said, touting those outputs as the world's largest number of panels per sheet in PDP production.

Panasonic forecasts that with the rapid increase of the demand for flat-panel TVs due to the global digitalization of TV broadcasts, 65 percent of the 200 million world aggregate demand for TVs will be for flat-panel TVs in 2010. Panasonic also forecasts that the demand for larger-screen TVs will increase rapidly, leading to more than 30 percent of the world aggregate demand for TVs occupied by the 37-inch or larger flat-panel TVs in 2010. Further increase of the demand is expected in China and other BRICs countries where infrastructure for digital TV broadcasts will be developed, as well as in the biggest TV markets such as the U.S. and Europe, the company added.