Hitachi to invest $500 million in Chinese hard drive factory

MAJOR HARD DRIVE maker Hitachi said that it is plunging resources into a large hard drive factory based in Shenzhen, in mainland China.

We reported in mid-may that all hard drive production would end up in China, not great news for people working in San Jose, an article denied by the firm.

That Eva Glass article led Hitachi to say it had no plans to move "all hard drive production to China by 2006".

Jim Pascoe, head of corporate communications, said then that the Chinese manufacturing operations would be limited to media and other drive component manufacturing. The media being the platters.

Hitachi said in a statement today that the Shenzhen centre will employ nearly 7,000 people in its first phase "to meet the growing demand for hard disk drives". The factory, which it describes as a "mega manufacturing centre", includes a 35,000 square metre manufacturing area.

Total investment will be around $500 million*, said Hitachi.

By Q4 2006, Hitachi will make 3.5-inch disk drives and it will be "ultimately capable of producing disk drives in varying form factors".

The media being the massage. µ

* APOLOGIES, we left out an extra 000 originally....