No. As the US was supplanted by Japan in consumer electronics, Japan has been subsequently supplanted by Korea and, increasingly China, in consumer electronics manufacture, including TVs. In fact, Japan has become a net importer of consumer electronics. Had the earthquake struck further south, there are some LCD component factories that could have been impacted as well as two large size LCD factories. However, these facilities seem to be undamaged.
While the loss of life is to be mourned and the loss of housing and its contents has to be replaced, most probably the net effect will be neutral as the loss of production from Japan is off-set by the loss of demand as Japan rebuilds.
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Best Wishes
I previously worked for a Mitsubishi plant in Koriyama, Japan. Koriyama is about 300Km from the epicenter. It is far enough north and small enough that is escaped the bombing during WWII and retains much of its antebellum Japanese character. The factory was closed during the economic tsunami of 2001. However, many of the workers may have been transferred to other Mitsubishi plants closer to Sendai.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to the subject, there were some smaller sized LCD plants that made. One of these, a Toshiba plant, made screens for notebooks. That plant will be down for a month. Most probably the main customer, Lenovo's ThinkPad group,will get their supplies from a monitor plant and some LCD TV plant may cover for the loss of monitor capacity. However, due to a previous inventory build, TV sized LCD glass is abundant, so again,no effect onTV set prices to the consumer.
ReplyDeleteFor the first 9 months of 2012, TV set sales in Japan are down 78%. Both Sony and Sharp are struggling. Part of this may be due to a flat global market, part to the rise of Chinese producers and the continuing advance f the Koreans. But most certainly the loss of sales in the home market is hurting as Japan prices would be expected to be above global pricing.
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