History (1995): IBM to Open HDD Factory in Hungary

IBM just sold its Havant, UK HDD factory to its personnel, and now it has announced its commitment to the European market by opening a new plant in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, 43 miles west of Budapest.

Production will begin in the last quarter of this year with 540MB and 1GB disk drives, and should exceed one million units by 1996.

IBM will initially invest “several millions of dollars,” said Edgar Rasch, the director of IBM Storage Systems (Mainz, Germany).

The plant will focus on components (platters, heads) and subsystems, and will no longer assemble drives.

“As far as we know this is the largest investment planned by any of the world’s major information manufacturers in Central Eastern Europe,” said Erik Strab, GM of IBM Hungary.

Big Blue will benefit from major advantages: exemption from taxes for 5 years, tax preferences for the following five years, tax holidays given by the Hungarian government, etc.

The plant’s 800 workers will not, in fact, be IBM employees, but will work for the Hungarian company Videoton-Mechatronika (a unit of Videoton), also the owner of the land where the new 24,000 square- foot factory will be built.

IBM will own only the assembly line itself. The company has another European HDD factory in Mainz, Germany that will concentrate primarily on component production (heads and magnetic platters) and subsystems.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 85, published on February 1995.