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Home > News > Declining demand for optical discs, Sony plans to lay off 250 employees in Japan
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Declining demand for optical discs, Sony plans to lay off 250 employees in Japan


According to industry reports in Japan, Sony will lay off 250 employees at its recordable media manufacturing plant in northern Japan due to reduced demand for media such as CDs and the continued rise of streaming services. However, Sony's production of pre pressed discs (ROM read-only discs) is not affected by layoffs, only the production of recordable discs such as CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R.

It is understood that Sony's media manufacturing business unit located in Toga Castle, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan, will cut 250 jobs. According to insiders, some of the laid-off personnel will adopt an early retirement plan.

At present, Sony's Duohe City factory has a total of 670 employees. Insiders say it is uncertain whether the remaining employees will be "safe", as industry reports suggest that Sony will "gradually stop producing optical storage media products, including Blu ray discs."

Is ROM disc production business safe?

Consumers of physical media media should not overly worry about the impact of Sony's optical storage production cuts, as these types of CDs are manufactured for the music, video, and gaming markets. The CEO of Sony's physical media business has claimed in some communities that the layoffs in optical media production facilities will not affect the pre suppression of CDs.

Despite the current rise of streaming media affecting storage media, Sony and Microsoft still release game consoles that support CDs, and some enthusiasts still insist on using physical media to build their music, video, and game collections. A current issue is that the digital content previously purchased by users may become inaccessible, or even permanently inaccessible, while physical CDs do not have such a problem. However, as physical media sales gradually decrease, users are being pushed online. Compared to streaming media, fans of physical media claim that this approach has better audiovisual fidelity.

Optical Disk Drive (ODD) was no longer a necessary component for desktops and laptops several years ago. Currently, users mostly use mechanical hard drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), NAS storage solutions, and cloud storage. As CDs become increasingly outdated among personal computer users, it seems natural for Sony to gradually phase out the production of burned/rewritable CDs.

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