Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has opened a Blu-ray Disc manufacturing plant in China with a production capacity of half a million discs a month for domestic and international markets.

Running of the 200-staff, 130,000-square-foot factory is through Shanghai Epic, a joint venture replication and music publishing company owned by Sony Disc & Digital Solutions, Shanghai Jingwen Investment and Shanghai Synergy Culture & Entertainment, both subsidiaries of Shanghai Media Group, the city’s biggest media company.

This latest move comes on the heel of Sony’s decision to start distributing imported Blu-ray discs into the world's most populous nation in November through a joint venture with Excel Media.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, SPHE's biggest Blu-ray sales account in China is Joyo.com, Amazon.com's domestic partner. BD titles are also sold at 100 Sony Electronics shops in China, in the government-run Xinhua Bookstore chain and in specialty shops catering to wealthy Chinese.

The first titles to be manufactured are Broken Trail, Surf's Up, Daddy Day Care, 21 and Vantage Point. They will be available in shops after the Chinese New Year holidays (26 Jan-2 Feb). Sony has already 32 Blu-ray titles in the market now and plans to have 100 out by the end of the year.

Sony vp for China Tim Meade said that the Blu-ray format represented 20% of SPHE's royalties business in such territories as Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia by the end of 2008, reports THR.

For Chinese consumers, Blu-ray is at present a major investment: HDTV sets cost about 10,000 yuan (€1,150), Blu-ray players range in price from 2,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan (€230-€1,150) and Blu-ray movies retail up to 200 yuan (€11.50) – about 10 times the price of a standard DVD title.

Furthermore, Blu-ray is being challenged by the substantially cheaper home-grown high-definition standard China Blue High-Definition (CBHD). Shanghai United Optical Disc has established a production line for CBHD and started production in the fourth quarter of last year.

The Shanghai facility is Sony's fourth Blu-ray production plant in the world. The others are Sony DADC plants in Salzburg (Austria), Terre Haute (Indiana, USA) and Shizuoka (Japan), each equipped with some 40 BD production lines. A fifth BD plant is due to open at the company's Pitman, New Jersey, facility by mid-2009.

Story filed 29.01.09