Prices for recordable DVD drives plunge despite tight supply

June 12, 2003

DVD recorders are becoming more and more affordable and Digitimes reports that prices might still be dropping altough supply is very tight. Sony Dual format drives have dropped from $ 400 to about $ 300, other dual format drive suppliers even offer their drives for about $ 220 coming from about $ 375. Retail prices for DVD-RW and DVD+RW drives have recently dropped to $ 170 from $ 380 in the first quarter of this year. Mainly NEC seems to be the company to thank for the low prices.

The rapid price reductions were mainly led by NEC, which is ahead of its competitors in DVD chip production. The Japanese company is now capable of producing about one million 4x DVD chip sets each month, while the maximum monthly capacities of its major competitors, including Pioneer, Sanyo Electric, Philips Semiconductors and Ricoh, are about 400,000 units or less, said local optical storage drive makers.

According to sources, both Pioneer and South Korea-based Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) have ordered 4x DVD chip sets from NEC. Revenues from the chip set business have allowed it to cut prices of its end products by significant margins.The company is still far behind major recordable DVD drive vendors in monthly shipments. While companies like Pioneer, Sony and Ricoh often ship 300,000-400,000 units per month, NEC in general ships fewer than 100,000 units a month, sources said.

The NEC internals are used in many drives such as Plextor and TDK DVD recorders. Read the entire story at Digitimes here. Also visit our DVD Hardware Forum.

Source: Digitimes.com