News.com reports on the recent appointment of American Tim Schaaff to the new role of senior vice president of software development, where he will head the company’s various Japanese divisions in an attempt to overcome duplication of effort and incompatibilities. Schaaff was formerly head of Apple’s QuickTime engineering team.
The Japan Times reports that the 2005 International Robot Exhibition began its four-day biannual event Wednesday. The recent move of robots outside of manufacturing to various other purposes is noted, such as cleaning and security jobs. Not mentioned is the compulsion for every Japanese company to make their robots look cute — something well-demonstrated by NEC’s PapeRo robots.
An increase of 9.2% in October makes for the third straight monthly rise, reports Kyodo News.
In response to huge estimated losses, Sanyo plans to greatly reduce the size of its television and appliance operations, reports Kyodo News and The Japan Times. The company may also spin off or sell its semiconductor division, the most unprofitable part of the company.
Nowadays, in the face of offshore production ‘Made in Japan’ is commonly associated with Japanese consumers (and many Westerners as well) with high-quality merchandise. Aside from the marketing advantage, however, in many cases domestic production in Japan still makes good business sense for technology products, Asahi Shimbun reports. This has been the experience of Hewlett Packard, largely due to failure rate: computers often develop problems when put through the rigors of shipping long distances, and HP has been able to cut the failure rate in half by switching to domestic production for the Japanese market. Greater ease of parts inventory management is also cited as an advantage.
Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC, Matsushita, and Resesas Technology to set up a ¥200 billion (US $1.68 billion), reports Reuters.
Sony and NEC set up a joint venture joining their optical disc drive operations, to start operating in April of next year producing DVD and CD drives. This is a strange move, for a couple of reasons: first, the industry will begin moving toward next-generation disc drives around that time, and second, Sony and NEC have taken opposite sides of the next-gen format wars, not just on the sidelines, but as lead developers of the formats: Sony having created the Blu-ray technology while NEC was co-developer of HD DVD. Mainichi has the story.
Sanyo is expected to forecast a net loss of ¥230 billion (US $1.93 billion) for this year, an increase from ¥140 billion in September, which was again an increase from ¥92 billion in April. Executive Director Satoshi Iue, the son of the company’s founder, is expected to resign to take responsibility for the company’s losses. The full story is available from Reuters and The Japan Times.
Toshiba and NEC have partnered to share costs to create the technology necessary for the next generation of semiconductor technology, which will reach as low as 45-nanometer circuit width. This via the Associated Press.
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