23 October 1997: On 9 October, Japan“s Sony Corp. opened its new US$ 300 million American Video Glass Company television glass factory in Stanton, Pennsylvania. The highly automated plant, developed …
23 October 1997: On 9 October, Japan“s Sony Corp. opened its new US$ 300 million American Video Glass Company television glass factory in Stanton, Pennsylvania. The highly automated plant, developed in partnership with Japan“s Asahi Glass Co. and the US firm Corning Inc., uses robots, high-temperature furnaces and other computer-controlled machinery to turn a million pounds of sand and other raw materials a day into television tubes. Announcing plans to expand the site further for the production of a new generation of large flat-screen picture tubes, Suehiro Nakamura, Sony“s executive vice president, said the Japanese electronics group would spend more than US$ 95 million to manufacture 32-inch and 36-inch “super flat” picture tubes. The company so far has spent about US$ 500 million to develop the television complex, the first in the world so vertically integrated that it takes in sand at one end and turns out television sets at the other. Nobuyuki Idei, Sony“s president and chief operating officer, said the next target for the complex is a US$ 60 million investment beginning this autumn to build one of the picture tube production lines mentioned by Nakamura.