Taiwan’s major manufacturers of optical disc drives, including Lite-On IT, Quanta Storage and BenQ, anticipate high growth in slim DVD burner sales in the second half of this year, as Digitimes reports. Taiwanese makers, currently lagging behind Japanese and South Korean competitors such as Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics (MKE), Toshiba, NEC, Teac, Ricoh and Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS), began production of slim DVD burners for notebooks last quarter and are each delivering the product in small volumes of 5,000-10,000 a month.

With second-tier notebook brands as clients, Taiwanese makers of slim DVD burners are competing for adoption by top brands such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP).

The OEM pricing for slim DVD burners is around US$150 at present, a drop of over 20% from a year earlier, Taiwanese makers indicated.

According to Lite-On IT, slim DVD burners are mainly used in high-end notebook models with prices of at least US$1,200-1,500 but use will be extended to notebooks priced below US$1,000 as the price level of burners drops significantly. Shipments of notebooks equipped with slim DVD burners will rise from four million to five million units (less than 10% of global sales) in 2003 to 15 million in 2004 (20-30% of global sales), the company pointed out.