Sony Blu-ray production kickstarts in May

Sony - bringing back the Blu-ray
Sony - bringing back the Blu-ray

Sony has announced that it is to re-open its Blu-ray manufacturing plant in Japan in late May; two months after operations were suspended at the facility due to the tsunami.

In a statement released this week, Sony noted that nine out of its 10 sites are now operational and, as of May, core production at these plants will resume.

"Optical disk manufacturing operations, including Blu-ray, are expected to resume around the end of May 2011, and magnetic tape manufacturing operations are expected to resume around the end of July 2011," said the release.

"Manufacturing of other products and components previously carried out at the Tagajyo Plant will be transferred to Sony's core manufacturing facilities for these products and components located in Miyagi, Fukushima and other prefectures, in order to quickly restore full production capacity."

Share slump

Sony's share price slumped this week to a low comparable to when the tsunami hit back in mid-March, this was due to the PSN debacle.

It seems that share prices could be affected further in the long term, however, with the statement noting: "The Company is continuing to evaluate the full impact of the Earthquake, tsunami and related power outages, including the impact of these production level adjustments, on Sony's businesses and consolidated financial results."

Via MacWorld

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.