Sony to open Memory Stick compatibility testing lab in Taiwan

July 31, 2004

Sony announced at the sixth annual Memory Stick Forum in Taiwan that it will establish a Memory Stick compatibility testing lab in Taiwan before the end of the year. This center will help speed up R&D and production schedules for Taiwanese manufacturers of IT products using Memory Sticks. Sony says there are over 100 licensed IT companies, including such big names as Acer, BenQ, Asustek and Apacer, engaged in the production of Memory Stick-compatible products in Taiwan, making the island an ideal location for Sony to build its first offshore testing laboratory.

Memory Sticks are a recording medium based on flash memory technology that can be used to record and transfer multimedia data among a wide spectrum of IT products. While Memory Sticks have been used primarily on digital cameras up until now, beginning this year the applications of these compact memory devices have expanded to include computers, digital video cameras, portable music players, voice recorders, handsets and e-books.

Sony plans to launch 2GB Memory Stick cards in the fall of this year and 4GB models with a data transmission speed of 10Mbps in spring 2005.

Sony has accumulated total sales of 70 million Memory Sticks up to March 2004. With the increasing number of applications for these devices, expanded memory capacity and faster transmission speeds, Sony expects sales to enter a high growth period this year. It estimates that global shipments of Memory Sticks will total 48 million units between April 2004 and March 2005, and rocket to 80 million units in the 12 months after that.

In its efforts to expand its market, Sony is actively promoting the integration of a variety of digital contents services with Memory Stick-compatible devices. These services, including the music downloading services Any Music and Connect and the LIBRIe e-book service, will permit digital content transfers directly to devices equipped with Memory Stick media slots.

With the Memory Stick market set to take off, Sony aims to bring more and more of Taiwan's hardware manufacturers into the Memory Stick family. This relationship will help Sony maintain its grasp on the compact memory device market and will also promote the development by Taiwan's IT hardware makers of a greater number of products with multiple content applications, bringing enormous benefits to all.

(Economic Daily News, Digitimes)

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