Toshiba bucks trend, hiring 600 in Laguna

JAPANESE company Toshiba will invest P110 million and employ more than 600 workers in Laguna to expand its operation beyond the production of hard disk drives.

In a statement, the Philippine Economic Zone Authority said it recently approved the new project of Toshiba Information Equipment Philippines Inc., a subsidiary of Toshiba Digital Media Co.

Toshiba Information Equipment Philippines will invest the money to produce solid-state storage devices in its manufacturing plant in the Laguna Technopark Special Economic Zone starting this month.

Solid state devices are hard disk drive-like devices that store data on flash memory instead of on a revolving magnetic disk. Toshiba is a leading global producer of such devices, and it expects to boost its worldwide share in the PC notebook and enterprise drives.

With the approval of the company’’s new expansion project, both hard disk drives and solid state drives will now be produced at Toshiba’’s Laguna facility.

The new project will employ 618 more workers who will work two shifts a day.

Toshiba said the operation would allow it to ship its annual exports of around $54.916 million to the US, Europe, China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea.

PEZA director general Lilia De Lima said Toshiba Philippines’ the new project of would create more jobs at a time when most companies were reducing employment.

She said the project would be given full incentives since it was an entirely new one.– Roderick T. dela Cruz, Manila Standard Today