Mitsubishi Set To Introduce Re-Write Cds

Mitsubishi Chemical Media Company, a 100 per cent subsidiary of the Japanese chemical giant, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, will introduce re-writeable compact discs in India next month. Rei Maruoka, MCM's country manager, India said, "the new products will be imported into India directly from Mitsubishi Chemical's manufacturing site at San Jose in the US."

The $ 11-billion Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation has pioneered the development and introduction of CD-re-writeable discs which, in terms of technology, represents a major step forward from recordable CDs.

The company has also introduced the highly sophisticated magneto optical (MO) disks with a vastly enhanced memory size of 2.6 gigabytes. MO disks are expected to replace the traditional floppy disks which have a smaller memory size of 2 megabytes.

Maruoka pointed out that though the market for floppy disks will continue to grow for some more time, MOs will be increasingly used by institutions which handle a large volume of data like medical establishments and printing press.

By acquiring Verbatim, Mitsubishi already has large capacities for production of floppy diskettes in Ireland and Australia and data cartridges in Mexico.

Mitsubishi Chemical Media comes under the information storage products division of Mitsubishi Chemicals, and is one of the largest players in the global market for data media products.

For the Indian market, it has a tie-up with two distributors in Delhi and one each in Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai.

The Japanese company is segmenting the Indian market in terms of different user categories. Thus, BK Consimpex, one of its distributors in Delhi, will be concentrating on distributing the products in the government departments as well as the corporate sector. The other distributor will take care of the small office home office (SOHO) segment.