Conference cookie::notes$archive:cd_v1

203.0. "Philips/Du Pont Venture" by PEANO::WHALEN () Wed Oct 30 1985 10:29

Associated Press Wed 30-OCT-1985 07:35                        Philips-Du Pont
   Philips, Du Pont Form Joint Venture To Make Optical Disks
                             By PETER COY
                          AP Business Writer
   NEW YORK (AP) - Du Pont Co. and N.V. Philips of the Netherlands
say they plan a joint venture to become the world's largest
supplier of optical disks, the high-tech platters that are making a
leap from music to data storage.
   Optical storage is still in its infancy and is mainly used to
make compact disks of digitally recorded music, but analysts say
optial disks will increasingly be used to store huge volumes of
computer data as well.
   As an example of the disks' capacity, Du Pont and Philips said a
single 14-inch-wide, high-density optical disk could hold the
unabridged dictionaries of every language in the world and search
out a particular word in less than a second.
   Most optical disks sold today cannot be altered once they are
recorded on, so they are seen mainly as replacements for paper,
microfilm and microfiche rather than as competition for magnetic
media. The disks are called optical because reading and recording
on them is done with light, in the form of narrow, low-powered
laser beams.
   Du Pont and Philips said Tuesday they hope their joint venture,
as yet unnamed, will sell $1 billion of blank optical disks a year
by 1990, when they expect worldwide industry sales to reach $4
billion a year.
   Edgar S. Woolard, a vice chairman of Du Pont, said the companies
expect that by 1990 about half the venture's sales will come from
data storage, with most of the rest coming from compact audio disks
and some from video or systems that combine audio, video and data.
   Among the major companies expected to compete for optical disk
sales are 3M Corp., Eastman Kodak Co. and several Japanese
companies, including Hitachi and Sony.
   Although the optical disk business is ``very embryonic,'' in
Woolard's phrase, industry analysts say it is growing at a rate of
several hundred percent a year.
   The Army Training Corps plans to buy 50,000 to 60,000 optical
disk drives for use in training soldiers. Also, Grolier Inc. will
sell a $199 optical disk starting next month containing the entire
contents of its 21-volume Academic American Encyclopedia, and
Disclosure Inc. of Bethesda, Md., plans to put out an optical disk
with the annual reports and 10K reports of all the Fortune 500
companies.
   Du Pont and Philips will pool $150 million in assets to get the
venture started early in 1986 and expect that by 1990 it will have
half a billion dollars in assets, about 3,500 employees and a $60
million annual budget for research and development, the companies
said.
   The venture will double the capacity of Philips' compact disk
factory in Hanover, West Germany, already the world's largest, to a
capacity of about 50 million compact disks a year, the partners
said. They said the venture plans to build a compact-disk plant of
equal size in Kings Mountain, N.C., near Charlotte. The venture
will also include plants in England and the Netherlands. The
companies said the venture will make compact disks for audio and
video, compact disks with read-only memory for data storage and
compact disks that can be written on one time by the user. They
said they will try three technological approaches to inventing a
disk that can be erased and recorded over, which analysts say could
make optical disks a major competitor for magnetic media.
   Philips pioneered optical disk technology in the late 1960s. The
Dutch company is probably already the world leader in optical disks
because it is No. 1 in the main kind of disks currently on the
market, blank compact audio disks for the recording industry, which
it introduced in 1983.
   Du Pont, the chemical and energy giant headquartered in
Wilmington, Del., said the venture with Philips would increase its
diversification into electronics, a field in which it had more than
$1 billion in sales last year.

   Get your Resum� ready......				;-)

	I read somewhere that the Phillips / Du Pont venture is actually
	Optical Storage International with Du Pont getting their fingers
	in with the Phillips and Control Data 3 year old joint venture.
	OSI's HQ is here in Colorado Springs in the new Foreign Trade Zone.

		\rik