According to DigiTimes, BenQ and Philips will join forces in the optical storage drive market. The joint venture, Philips BenQ Digital Storage, will begin operations next month:
According to BenQ and Philips, the joint venture will initially produce CD drives and DVD drives, both in read-only-memory (ROM) and rewritable (RW) format. It will consider launching optical storage devices for consumer applications in the future. According to K.Y. Lee, chairman and CEO of BenQ, the joint venture's products would mainly conform to the DVD+RW instead of DVD-RW standard. Philips has always been a leader of the DVD+RW standard, and PC vendors such as Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard (HP) also support the standard, Lee pointed out. |
The new venture's shipments for this year are expected to reach 28 million units and rise to about 15% of the global market of 200 million units per year in the next year to one and half years, BenQ and Philips said. The two companies currently have a combined 7% to 8% market share.
According to the article Pioneer, one of BenQ's long-term clients, decided to exclude BenQ from its DVD-RW product contractors' list after the joint venture announcement.
Source: DigiTimes
