Seagate to invest Bt15.3 bn over five years in expansion of Korat complex
Seagate Technology is investing Bt15.3 billion over five years to expand its manufacturing and development facility in Nakhon Ratchasima province, also known as Korat - already its largest hard-drive manufacturing campus in the world.
Jeffrey Nygaard, senior vice president and global head of operations, said yesterday that Bt4.6 billion of the budget would be for construction and Bt10.7 billion for equipment.
The new building will open next year and become fully operational in four more years. This project will create 2,500 jobs in the country.
The Korat campus covers 240,000 square metres with built-up area of 160,060sqm. It will be enlarged 49 per cent to 237,856sqm.
Advanced technology at the new facilities will support the new products coming in the future for cloud computing.
Data storage will continue to grow at 26 per cent per year through 2020, when the data-storage market is expected to be three or four times the size and about 60 per cent of it will be in the cloud.
Seagate’s investment will help the company offer products and services to meet customers’ demands with broad solution portfolios.
The new plant will focus on data-storage components, finished products and research and development.
Seagate continues to invest in Thailand for three reasons – it has strong teams, both technical and operating, Asia is a high-growth market for data storage, and the cost structure for professionals, both engineers and technicians, is still good.
Thailand is in a great location with good logistics to access other countries in Asia, especially China and India, as well as the rest of the world, Nygaard said.
"We are not low-cost manufacturing but we are high-tech manufacturing. Human resources here are professional with a good cost structure. In terms of numbers of staff, Thailand is the largest facility of ours, with over 16,000 employees."
Seagate’s three largest manufacturing facilities in Asia are in Thailand, Malaysia and China. Asia contributes more than 40 per cent of Seagate’s total revenue. He said this investment would help increase the export value of hard drives but he could not disclose growth figures.
Last year, Seagate exported Bt110 billion worth of hard drives, as a part of its total exports of Bt1.8 trillion over its 32 years in Thailand.
"Investment in technology is our DNA. We continue invest in R&D every year. This year R&D investment will be Bt1.8 billion, the same as last year," Nygaard said.
Ajarin Pattanapanchai, senior executive adviser to the Board of Investment, said that over the past eight years, the BOI had incentivised Seagate to make hard-disk drives and components.
"Under the long-term investment policy to promote the electronics industry in Thailand, we have approved eight projects of Seagate Technology that together have the value of Bt55.6 billion. This investment is one of them," he said.
