Losses for 4th consecutive year for the CD-R, DVD-R and BD-R pioneer
Taiyo Yuden Co., Ltd. is announcing a decision on voluntary retirement from Board of Directors meeting.
The company is asking employees to accept voluntary retirement. Details pertaining to the solicitation of voluntary retirement are discussed below. The company also announced revisions to its consolidated full-year earnings forecast released on November 9, 2011 for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012 for the period from April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2012. The decision to solicit voluntary retirement will result in an extraordinary loss in this fiscal year.
Reason for Soliciting Employees
for Voluntary Retirement
As stated by the company on November 9, 2011 in the press release titled TAIYO YUDEN Announces the Reasons for Discrepancies between Consolidated Forecast and Actual Results, Earnings Forecast Revisions, and Reversal of Deferred Tax Assets,' the company made a significant downward revision to its consolidated earnings forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2012 and expects to record a net loss for the fourth consecutive fiscal year.
The company will implement measures that balance both structural reforms and growth strategies in order to improve profitability in the face of the challenging operating environment seen today and expected in the future. The company has established a target and related actions to reduce fixed costs by ¥10,000 million before the end of March 2013. One of these actions is to solicit employees to accept voluntary retirement.
Summary of Solicitation for Voluntary Retirement:
Number of employees to solicit: Approximately 330
Target employees: All employees of TAIYO YUDEN CO., LTD.
Solicitation period: March 1, 2012 to March 8, 2012
Retirement date: March 31, 2012 (planned)
Benefits for retirees: Employees that volunteer for this program will receive special extra retirement payment. The company will also provide re-employment assistance to employees.
Future Outlook
The company plans to allocate ¥3,200 million as a business structure improvement expenses allocated for special extra retirement payments to be provided to employees participating in the aforementioned voluntary retirement program. This provision will be recorded as an extraordinary loss on the company's consolidated financial statements in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012.
Revision to the company's Earnings Forecast
This revision was made to the company's consolidated full-year earnings forecast due to an extraordinary loss realized for business structure improvement expenses. Specifically, the provision is for special extra retirement payments to employees participating in the voluntary retirement program.
Our comments :
Among several other activities, Taiyo Yuden entered in the development of CD-R in 1988, announcing in September of this year the release of the world's first recordable CD-R compact disks, being a technology pioneer in this field, then in DVD-R and BD-R with the first recordable Blu-ray disc using an organic dye recording layer.
The Japanese firm was known for the excellent quality of its discs, being probably the only one to strictly follow the Orange Book specs. But the results were expensive products in an industry where the prices fell drastically, one of the reason being that some manufacturers refuse to pay royalties to the CD-R consortium headed by Philips. Currently only 32 firms have a licensed on CD-R and CD-R Veeza (replacing CD-R), covering essential patents of Sony and Taiyo Yuden. Under Veeza, Philips has cut royalties from 4.5 US cents to 2.5 US cents per piece, but charge royalties based on the number of shipments. Now the only activity in the optical industry for the Netherlands' firm is to collect these royalties.
In 2008, JVC spins off its recordable media business to a new company, Victor Advanced Media Co., Ltd., and starts a joint venture owned at 65% by Taiyo Yuden.
We have counted 119 companies (see below), most of them in Asia, who manufactured write-once CDs. A lot of them disappeared or stopped this business.
CD-R was a huge market, killing floppy disk, but has been progressively replaced by flash key and HDD. DVD-R was a lower market and BD-R is a much smaller one.
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/optical/t…tary-retirement
wer die nächsten jahre/jahrzehnte noch mit silberscheiben rumfuchteln will, sollte zugreifen solange es noch rohlinge in vernünftiger qualität gibt. 
