Plasmon MT Surprised by Our Comments

We have received this email from Freek Ahlrichs, C-Corb BV:

I was a bit surprised to read your comments on your website Storagenewsletter.com about our Acquisition of French based Plamon MT without consulting anyone of this merger first.

You are right about the Plasmon MT website. We haven’t updated the website as of yet and it still contains old information about Plasmon MT when Jan Zuring and Lou Wulms (J&L) were the only two shareholders of Plasmon MT. The updated version will go online during next week.

With lack of money, direction and no market knowledge of the recordable stamper industry by J&L (recordable optical media is made in Asia, Middle East and South America, and hardly in Europe where J&L were selling pre-recorded stampers only ), Plasmon MT was heading for a new bankruptcy soon after their take over of Plasmon OMS in 2010 from the Italian company 2LLC Investment.

Early in 2013 it was brought to the attention of C-CORB B.V. that Plasmon MT was going to file for bankruptcy in April. Just before the filing date we asked the French Court in Caen to give us a two-month period to make an offer to take over Plasmon MT in full. During this period we came to the conclusion that it was not worthwhile taking over the entire Plasmon organisation as it was at that time. End of 2012 we started already building a first class new facility to produce stampers in the USA and from a cost perspective point of view it was better to integrate the recordable stamper business manufacturing of Plasmon MT within this new facility. In order for us to do so we took over all assets, product know how, manufacturing procedures & equipment from Plasmon MT in July once bankruptcy was officially announced. We also hired Massimo Di Giorgio the old MD of both Plasmon OMS and Plasmon MT.

The technical manager of Plasmon MT, Mr. Patrice Floch was not hired by us but we choose to work with Mr. Pascal Andre, the technical manager of Plasmon OMS for more then 20 years, who was laid off in 2010 by J&L. The technical knowledge of Mr. Pascal Andre goes far beyond the knowledge of Mr. Patrice Floch. In USA we have specialised engineers working in Galvanics who will be put under supervision of Pascal Andre in the near future when new formats of recordable media will be developed.

Our focus, other then the focus of J&L, will be to continue the manufacturing of recordable CD-R and DVD-R stampers and become the N°1 player in the world again, like Plasmon during its old days.

In France we will continue with a small operation with strong focus on R&D. As you have mentioned in your article the operation in Caen was started with the development of the Glass Disc (Century Disc) to store information for more then 100 years for archiving reasons. Currently we (C-CORB B.V.) are negotiating with several French based companies to continue the development of the Glass Disc for archiving and lifetime guaranteed storage. Our focus and believe is not on pre-recorded glass discs but we believe in the future of archiving on recordable discs like BD recordable but with a guaranteed lifetime of more then 100 years. We believe in the private/consumer market who wants to store their pictures and home made movies for ever, not risking to loose the information. Of course the solution will fit perfectly into the professional market as well, but to make it economical the consumer market must be made aware (much higher volume).

Negotiations about this new direction of storage on glass are taking place already for months with IMS (University of Bordeaux), Laphia Laboratory & Amplitude systèmes élaborante thé femtosecond laser. C-CORB B.V. has been in close contact the last few years with companies like GE who investigated the possibility of storing 10TB of information on one single glass disc. We have some slightly different idea’s for the glass disc as said above and are confident to market the new product with great succes.

Finally your comment about the Plasmon equipment is quite correct. Most equipment is very old. However our new stamper production facility was already in place before we took over the equipment of Plasmon MT. All new equipment has been installed in that facility. Only some of the test & Finishing Equipment from Plasmon MT we are using in our new facility. All the equipment we are using has been refurbished by the OEM. All other equipment that we are not using in production we have dismantled and are using or selling it for parts.