Pioneer to build new plasma TV plant in Japan

Pioneer said it would build a new plasma television plant in Japan, but the size of the investment, output capacity and other details had not been decided.

Pioneer lags a long way behind industry leaders Matsushita Electric Industrial, maker of Panasonic brand electronics, and South Korea's LG Electronics in plasma TV output capacity, hurting its cost competitiveness.

A Pioneer spokesman said the Tokyo-based company is seeking to buy 24.7 acres of land in central Japan's Yamanashi prefecture for its new plant.

Since production capacity and the timing for commercial output will be set only after observing the sales trend in the year-end shopping season, the scale of investment has yet to be decided, the spokesman said.

He added, however, that it had spent about 26 billion yen (US$227.3 million) to build another Yamanashi plasma TV plant, which has an annual capacity to make 300,000 units.

The comments follow a report by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily on Sunday that Pioneer will spend more than 30 billion yen to build a new plasma TV plant in the prefecture.

The Tokyo-based company plans to bring the new plant onstream as early as during the business year ending March 2008, the newspaper said.

The plant will initially produce a little more than 300,000 units a year, but the annual output will eventually be raised above 1 million units, doubling Pioneer's total production capacity, it reported.

Pioneer held a 6.2 percent share in the plasma TV market in 2005, while Matsushita controlled more than a quarter of the global market and LG Electronics had a 14.9 percent share, according to DisplaySearch.