Sony shuts down production of recordable CD-R, DVD-R and BD-R discs

By Alimat Aliyeva

Sony has announced the reduction of 250 jobs at its optical disc manufacturing plant in Tagaze, Japan, as part of an initiative to completely phase out the production of recordable optical media. All because of the decrease in demand for these products — consumers prefer other media, Azernews reports.

Sony will gradually cease production of media on optical discs, including Blu-ray discs, at its plant in northeastern Japan. About 250 of the company's 670 employees will be laid off, while some employees will be offered early retirement packages.

It is noted that the cuts will only affect the production of empty media such as CD-R, DVD-R and BD-R, while the release of discs for the audio, video and games market will continue at the same volume, since despite the growing popularity of streaming services, some consumers still prefer physical media because of the higher audio and video quality, as well as the ability to create collections. In addition, there are many cases when previously purchased digital content became unavailable.

The general trend shows a decrease in demand for optical discs. Optical disk drives (ODD) have long ceased to be an important component of desktop computers and laptops, and users are increasingly choosing external hard drives, SSDs, memory cards, flash drives, network storage (NAS) and cloud services for data backup. It seems that with the development of data storage technologies, consumer preferences are changing.