Hitachi has problems with mobile hard drives

BY 2006, all hard drive production will be in China, Toni tells me. The following memo is not great news for her or her friends in San Jose. µ

WW MEDIA MANUFACTURING AND ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
April 2004

Hitachi's GST Dana Drive:

Substrate Supply
Glass substrates continue to be in very short supply in both San Jose and Odawara. Two primary reasons contribute to this shortage in SJ. First, the additional capacity installed by our supplier in Thailand has not been qualified on schedule due to quality issues with the first set of parts. Although qualification is now near we have been hurt since March by this issue. Second, a quality problem at our supplier s factory in the Philippines has stop shipments in April. Both of these issues demonstrate our company commitment that we cannot compromise quality to our customer to meet supply. Because our pipelines are now empty we expect to have periodic substrate shortages for several months following the successful resolution of these issues.

Shenzhen Update
The last few weeks have been very eventful in Shenzhen. The phase 1 cleanroom was completed and the first tool was moved in on March 31, one day ahead of schedule. Subsequently, many more tools have been moved into the cleanroom, and we are now doing tool alignments and hookups in preparation to start debug activities. We are planning to make HDD qualification shipments in 3Q and start production in 4Q so there is a lot of work to do over the next few months.