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Panasonic To Stop Making LCD Panels For TVs (nhk.or.jp)
AmiMoJo quotes a report from NHK WORLD: Japanese electronics maker Panasonic says it will stop making LCD panels for televisions, giving way to fierce price competition. The pullout from TV LCD manufacturing follows the company's withdrawal from plasma TV production 3 years ago. They say they will continue to manufacture LCD panels at the plant for products other than televisions, such as medical equipment and cars. They say the company will keep making Panasonic-brand televisions, using panels supplied by other manufacturers. After Panasonic pulls out, Sharp and its Taiwanese parent firm Hon Hai will be the only producer in Japan.
I hate replying to 0-modded comments, but this one deserves a honourable mention: they really haven't really fallen, they just peaked. Actually Japan is the very first country in this world to experience the future. And by future, I mean the socioeconomic and cultural consequences of "civilizational endgame", for lack of a better expression. Japan was the first country to achieve what many will follow. The real problem here is that unlike other crysis, overflow population combined with ageing and the very fact that the human society values the preservation of individual life is the perfect storm for any given nation to just stop outputing anything. It is a scenario where both capitalism and comunism will try, like many a time before, to seize democratic power, but this time they won't be able to do any "final measure" against it because there is absolutely no pollitically correct way to influence the populace into extreme measures. I know I know, just planted a philosophical bomb in an LCD thread, but it's late at night and I felt inspired for nonsense. It does make sense though.
Sharp has always tried do be 3/4 of the price and 1/2 the quality of Sony. I used to hate having to sell Sharp when I worked retail. So often I'd lose a customer for good.
AFAIK, Sony didn't make LCDs for their TVs, most of the panels are made by Sharp or Samsung (depending on the models). For the smaller Sony branded TVs, sony went with even cheaper taiwanese panel makers (e.g, CPT, AUO, CMO). Sony did augment their TVs with their own digital signal processing logic and LED back-lighting scheme, but I'm pretty sure panel was pretty much the same one in Sharp...
This topic is really interesting to me. I had a professor a few years ago when I was doing postgrad that thought exactly that; that the Japanese had reached the capitalist endgame. He went on to explain (at great length) that the Japanese were still clinging to the original model of capitalism, and the only way forward was high tech communism.
What he meant wasn’t the communism of the Soviet era, but a communism in which menial work is left to robotics and AI with humans having the freedom to engage in creative pursuits, invention and leisure. He believes (and his arguments were quite convincing) that the Japanese have a HUGE supply productive potential with very little demand, and that their current socio-economic model is the product of not seeing the forest for the trees.