History (1994): Several Asian Firms Want to Avoid EC Anti-Dumping Taxes on Floppy Disks

CIS Technology Inc., one of Taiwan’s largest floppy disk makers, is to build a 500 million Taiwan dollar ($19 million) plant in Northern Ireland to circumvent EC anti-dumping taxes.

York Fit Micro Products Ltd. of Hong Kong has a new factory named York Fit Micro Memory Ltd. in Vancouver, Canada, with production scheduled to begin in August at a monthly rate of 1.2 million 3.5-inch floppy disks. The HK$400 million company also has production facilities in China.

CMC Magnetics Corp. (Taipei, Taiwan) has opened a new 3.5-inch FD plant at the Nelson Park Industrial Estate in Cramlington, UK under the name of Europa Magnetics Corp. Ltd. Over £26 million will be invested in the manufacturing facility that should employ 550 people in 3 years. Production will be initially 3 million then 10 million diskettes per month at the end of 1996. Europa Magnetics received an £8.2 million grant under UK’s assistance program to build the factory. Actually, CMC is shipping 20 million FDs a month from its Chung H. factory in Northern Taiwan. BASF and Maxell are also OEMs of the Taiwanese company.

Hong Kong-based Eden International Co. moved its production of floppy disks to Thailand. The annual output is 36 million disks.

Host Diskette Manufacturer Ltd. has a new factory in Bangladesh, India, which is exporting around one million diskettes per month. The Hong Kong company plans to increase production to 5 million disks. Host has a factory in China with 500 people producing 3 million floppy diskettes per month.

Ocean Computer Diskette factory, a Megabyte Magnetic Industrial’s parent company in Hong Kong, is setting up a new floppy disk factory in Penang, Malaysia, “to take care of EC customers.”

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠74, published on March 1994.