Being a service agent for Palsonic, i can tell that al the Tvs I've seen are "made is china". But i must admit it is heaps better than other asian brands. HDTV models (76WSHD), for example are quite good.
Rudolf
My 51" rear projection Panasonic is made in China too. I can imagine the shipping costs involved.
Rudolf
The decision was dictated purely by the economics and logistics of building flat panel display products.
With respect to Asia, FPDs (the screen themselves along with the lamps, drivers and associated pixel driving/decoding intelligence) are only built in a handful of OEM factories.
It is monumentally expensive to set up a production facility for the panels, plus quality control is crucial (far higher than for CRTs), so fewer panel production plants allow for concentration and more efficient use of resources.
These FPDs are shipped as kits and then turned into the various TVs and similar apparatus by adding PSU, tuner modules, I/O and audio stages, user interface modules and the enclosure to form a finished product.
FPD's form most of the bulk and weight in a LCD or Plasma TV set. To ship these down to Australia, along with the re-tooling and re-equipping of plant would have provided little return on investment, since the market here is tiny compared to the rest of the big consumers.
Plus all of this investment will economically supply only the AU/NZ/Pacific region. Export of the finished product is uneconomic because most of the weight and bulk has been imported in the first place - so it costs twice as much in freight. Labour costs are not as big a factor as people may think since automated production and goods handling systems takes care of most of the labour.
Singapore is a good choice for an assembly plant. It forms a regional hub, whereas AU is really an end-of- the-line location. Raw materials, components and sub- assemblies can flow into and back out of SNG with very little cost impost. Land and labour can be (relatively) cheaply sourced from Malaysia, plus SNG is already an established shipping point for the Oceania region, the EU and the rest of Asia. It is cheaper to ship from SNG to Perth and northern Australia than to do so from Sydney or Melbourne.
The market for crts is drying up. There's no point in making something en mass that nobody is going to buy. The market is going for plasma and lcd screens, something the Panasonic factory was not geared to produce, and would be very expensive to setup for production and testing of flat panel displays.
They are setting up in Singapore for another reason, not directly associated with producing flat panel displays. You can read about it here
I'm getting a good wage, and it's not because I work on an assembly line.
David
I saw recently on an SBS program that Wal-Mart in the US takes about 20% of China's factory output.
Anyway, the Panasonic crts would have been shipped around the Pacific basin. I wouldn't think that they would have been manufactured solely for the Australian markets.
"David, not to be confused with the other Davids." wrote in news:c4IVf.17083$dy4.9027@news- server.bigpond.net.au:
It is, in the sense that there's quite a skilled labour force available there, and it's very centrally located. There's a lot of name brand electronics "manufacturers" (assemblers?) on Jalan Ahmed Ibrahim, and surrounding districts over there in the west of the country.
GB
-- "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." (Diderot, paraphrasing Meslier)
dmm wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Interesting. Matsushita's semiconductor assembly plant in Singapore west is the company I did the intial install of an ERP system for some ten or so years ago. Big place, impressive. Nice folks too. And plenty of real estate out there for expansion. Very Japanese/Fordist, the entire workforce started their day with calisthenics in the 'quadrangle'!
They had some really impressive SMT assembly capability back when SMT was very very new and whiz-bang (It still warranted a 'T' in the name, instead of a lowly 'D'!). One wonders what they're up to nowadays!
GB
-- "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." (Diderot, paraphrasing Meslier)
China's
Australian markets.
The engineering manager at the factory told me (about 5 years ago now) that they did export large numbers to numerous parts of the the Asia pacific region. They were very productive, one TV set assembled, tested, boxed and out the door every 49 seconds or so. It was an impressive plant.
Dave :)
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