History 2002: DVD-R Media Market Booming

If we believe market research data from Understanding Solutions, offered at Comdex by Ritek, the world’s largest manufacturer of recordable optical disks, the DVD-R market has only begun to take off this year, but will experience remarkable growth in the near future, comparable to that of CD-Rs.

From 19 million units in 2001, it should exceed 1.7 billion in 2005.

It’s a surprisingly tricky matter to figure out who actually manufactures recordable DVDs these days. Ritek offers the following list:

• for DVD-Rs: CMC, Mitsubishi Chemical, Pioneer, Ritek, Taiyo Yuden, and TDK [to this list we would add Mitsui, at least, and probably Prodisc. -Ed.]
• for DVD-RAMs: CMC, Lead Data, Maxell, Matsushita, Optodisc, Prodisc and Ritek
• for DVD-RWs: JVC, Mitsubishi Chemical, Pioneer, Ritek and TDK.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 168 on January 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.