Sony's Thai factory--total loss

[monza]

Also Nikon's.

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/business/Global-fallout-of-Thai-floods-30167951.html

Doesn't bode well for the NEX 7 production...

 

[Lonnie Utah]

Ouch.

 

[Terry]

It feels like X100 deja vu.

 

[edwardkaraa]

The damage seems to be bigger than you could imagine.

 

[emr]

Does that really mean all the Thai factories of Sony and Nikon? Or do they have only one big one over there?

The **** really hits the fan for Japanese industry - not to mention so many individuals. Tsunami, floods, Olympus mess.

 

[edwardkaraa]

Afaik, the flooded ones are where they make cameras and lenses, while they have other factories in other regions where they manufacture other stuff.

 

[clark666]

Maybe they will be forced to use Olympus dSLR bodies?? That is the only hope I have to use my 4/3s lenses.

 

[kit laughlin]

I am so sorry to hear this; tough times, indeed.

 

[rubysky]

Tough times indeed.

I hope the people there get the helps that they need. I can wait for a camera.

 

[jonoslack]

Tough times indeed.

I hope the people there get the helps that they need. I can wait for a camera.

Quite right too - but there are mixed messages, a little googling tells many different stories.

Added to which different people have different agendas (not suggesting Robert of course).

Let's also hope that things are better than they are being portrayed in some places.

 

[etrigan63]

Here's hoping their contingency plans are well made. More importantly is that relief efforts are made for all of the displaced people in the area. I shall be waiting patiently for my NEX-7. When it arrives, it arrives.

 

[jonmanjiro]

What a mess. And right when Sony and Nikon etc. needed to crank up production to meet the christmas demand.

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

Quite right too - but there are mixed messages, a little googling tells many different stories.

Added to which different people have different agendas (not suggesting Robert of course).

Let's also hope that things are better than they are being portrayed in some places.

Unfortunately, things are worse rather than better. At the moment, what will happen is anybody's guess. They just sent out evacuation warning for Makkasan, a low lying area in Central Bangkok. The flood in Ayuttaya where the camera and other electronics factories are located will probably be flooded for weeks or even a couple of months.

Unfortunately, this flood was not unexpected. It's been very close for several years now, and little or nothing has been done to prevent it. Homes and rice fields in central provinces have been flooded routinely year after year to "save" Bangkok.

 

[etrigan63]

Thanks Jorgen for the report from "Our Man in Thailand" (that makes it sound like you work for MI-6). Unfortunately, Sony and Nikon execs have been as shortsighted as their western counterparts in the last couple of decades, so their response to this natural disaster will become a telling point for how well they planned for this.

In my day job, we have disaster plans for disaster plans. Our IT installation in Miami is distributed over three sites and any one of the sites can handle the full load of the other two for a short period of time (a couple of months). Should Florida get sawed off the rest of the continent, we have backup facilities in upstate New York and Denver, CO. You will get your tax notices and jury summons even if the peninsula has sunk into the ocean.

Here's hoping that Nikon, Sony and the rest have something like that in some small way. In the meantime, prayers and help need to be sent for the people directly affected by this. Indirectly, the factory shutdown will affect the Thai economy which will impact those same people, so it behooves the corporate entities involved to get their act together as soon as they can to get the economy of the area going again.

 

[Terry]

I'm not so sure I agree with your assessment. Presumably, factories in Thailand are somewhat of a diversification of plan to not keep all production concentrated in Japan (and it is also a lower cost alternative). To have both Japan and Thailand facilities both sustain severe damage within 6 months of each other isn't just a simple recovery. It is also a completely different recovery to restore IT than it is manufacturing.

 

[kit laughlin]

In my day job, we have disaster plans for disaster plans

Music to my ears: not negative thinking, at all, but a sensible planned strategy if/when disaster strikes—an elaborate 'backup' plan, if you like.

To continue the disk analogy, "disk failure is a matter of when, not if."

My heart goes out to these folk to be sure.

But if anyone wants to read about why humans are literally blind to rare (although not in this case) and potentially catastrophic events, you can do no better than "The Black Swans", by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. No planning for these events is a very very old problem.

 

[jonoslack]

I Think Terry has it here - and anyway Carlos - it's akin to both Florida and New York being 'cut off' in your analogy.

Here is a Link from Reuters

 

[etrigan63]

I'm not so sure I agree with your assessment. Presumably, factories in Thailand are somewhat of a diversification of plan to not keep all production concentrated in Japan (and it is also a lower cost alternative). To have both Japan and Thailand facilities both sustain severe damage within 6 months of each other isn't just a simple recovery. It is also a completely different recovery to restore IT than it is manufacturing.

That would be correct Terry, if Sony manufactured their camera lines in multiple facilities distributed geographically. However, these factories made headphones, Alpha A65 cameras, and NEX-7 cameras and kit lenses. Those product lines are now at zero output. Therefore, Sony may have multiple production facilities, but they are running a limited part of the line card with no provision for covering the loss of another facility.

And no, recovering a lost IT facility is no different than recovering a lost manufacturing plant. You don't just plunk a mainframe computer and all of its attending systems and infrastructure in a convenient closet somewhere. It takes the same amount of planning, manpower, and resources to put one of those up as it does to deploy a manufacturing/assembly facility.

Yes, I know that some computer companies make IT "pods" (for lack of a better term) in shipping containers, but those are emergency systems and not for permanent installations.

 

[etrigan63]

I Think Terry has it here - and anyway Carlos - it's akin to both Florida and New York being 'cut off' in your analogy.

Here is a Link from Reuters

That's why we have Colorado.

 

[Terry]

That would be correct Terry, if Sony manufactured their camera lines in multiple facilities distributed geographically. However, these factories made headphones, Alpha A65 cameras, and NEX-7 cameras and kit lenses. Those product lines are now at zero output. Therefore, Sony may have multiple production facilities, but they are running a limited part of the line card with no provision for covering the loss of another facility.

And no, recovering a lost IT facility is no different than recovering a lost manufacturing plant. You don't just plunk a mainframe computer and all of its attending systems and infrastructure in a convenient closet somewhere. It takes the same amount of planning, manpower, and resources to put one of those up as it does to deploy a manufacturing/assembly facility.

Yes, I know that some computer companies make IT "pods" (for lack of a better term) in shipping containers, but those are emergency systems and not for permanent installations.

Having been flooded out of a major office tower in San Francisco for four months this year (where a chiller pipe broke right on top of our network equipment) I can say for sure it is easier to move people to different offices and get connectivity than to replace manufacturing. We even used mifi wireless routers on floors above the flood but still lost connectivity. There are plenty of companies with systems back up capability as their sole business. In our case we could still hook into corporate systems from different locations.

Sony may have been producing NEX7's in one plant. However, the delay on the cameras doesn't appear to be infinite until they build a whole new plant. It just takes time to move the manufacturing to a different facility and to get them tooled up to make a different model. Where it gets more complex is when your supply chain is also disrupted if they can't get all of the parts they need.

So I think we will simply disagree on our assessment of contingency planning and what it takes to turn on connectivity in different places vs. build a camera in a different location by shifting manufacturing capacity and changing over a production line. Having extra capacity in the Sony network to work out contingencies will always take time because no company can completely afford to have backup facilities for every single product.

An analogy would be auto production. BMW produces all of the X3's for markets around the world in South Carolina. I highly doubt they are sitting with an idle plant that can get X3's into production without delays. In reality they would need to shift production of other vehicles in other places, adjust their parts and supply chain logistics etc. to ramp back up again in a different location.