History (1991): Mitsubishi Kasei Buys PDO

Mitsubishi Kasei Corp. (Tokyo, Japan) has purchased Philips and Dupont Optical (Wilmington, DE), a 50/50% joint venture between E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc. and NV Philips.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

PDO is a manufacturer of optical media.

Last year, it was announced that the professional and optical disk mastering of PDQ was for sale.

Philips and Dupont have concluded that the companies’ objectives concerning PDO’s long-term direction have diverged.

A few months ago, the US CD-ROM business of PDO was sold to DMI or Disc Manufacturing Inc., a Quixote group company.

In October 91, PDO wanted to transfer full ownership of its European business to Philips.

The 40 people from PDO will become employees of Verbatim Corp. (Charlotte, NC), a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak sold to Mitsubishi Kasei in May 1990.

Verbatim manufactures floppy disks, magnetic tape cartridges and cassettes, and optical discs. Mitsubishi Kasei already has an annual production capability of 1.2 million M-0 drives in its factory in Mizushima, to which now has to be added the half million disks of PDQ.

After PDQ is sold to Mitsubishi, there will only be Japanese manufacturers of magneto-optical media except for 3M (Saint Paul, MN), Hoechst (Wiesbaden, Germany), and Plasmon Ltd. (Near Royston, Harts, UK).

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠47, published on December 1991.