Why Sony is drawn to Salzburg
Sony moves its CD and gaming production from Indiana to Thalgau. The disc market is shrinking.
Disks come and go. The only reminder of the floppy disk is the symbol for saving on the computer. It didn’t stand a chance against the compact disc with its much larger storage capacity. The CD has been pushed back for years by advancing digitization. As a storage medium, for example from the cloud. When listening to music from streaming service providers such as Spotify. As DVD from Netflix, Disney+ and so on. And computer games are also increasingly migrating to the Internet.
Even if the market is shrinking: the CD factory in Thalgau east of Salzburg is not running out of work for the time being. Because in the middle of the year, the manufacturer of optical storage media Sony DADC is relocating the entire disc and gaming production for the European and American markets to Austria. Production in Terre Haute, where Sony has been producing discs since the 1980s, will be shut down. 100 workers lose their jobs there. Only the packaging and distribution units remain in the very first CD factory in the USA – around 150 employees remain.