Good news for Panasonic in the last 48 hours. The company announced yesterday that it now officially turned Sanyo into a subsidiary after acquiring a 50.27% stake in its smaller rival. The merger was in the making for several months, and Panasonic paid a whopping $4.4 billion to make it happen. So we now have Japan’s second largest electronics maker in terms of sales (Hitachi is still the biggest).
And one day later, Tuesday morning Japanese time, Panasonic announced another accomplishment: The company has completed the world’s largest plant for plasma panels. It’s located in Amagasaki in Southern Japan and is ready to produce the largest PDPs in the industry (Panasonic says panels sized at 330 centimeters by 190 cm can now be mass-produced).
The company seems to believe there’s still a lot of room for flat TV sales and has big plans for the near future. Its new plasma panel plant will begin full-scale operation next month, producing 120,000 42-inch plasma panels per month.
Panasonic aims at offering a total of 30 million plasma and LCD TVs in fiscal 2012, double the amount for fiscal 2009. Another new plant is scheduled to begin producing LCD TVs in July 2010.