Toshiba seeks rail, power projects in the country

Toshiba Corp. is eyeing a bigger presence in the country’s rail and power projects, a testament to its confidence in its prospects here.

“The Philippines is growing, so there are more opportunities to increase and enhance infrastructure, including power generation. That’s where we’re seeking to be part of. Metropolitan transportation is also one of the areas where we are (eyeing to) expand,” said Tatsuo Doko, corporate representative for Asia at Toshiba Corp.

The company, through its local unit Toshiba Information Equipment Philippines (TIP), has long been contributing to the country’s power generation industry through several hydro, thermal and geothermal power projects in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao while providing power transmission and distribution equipment for substations. It has also delivered air traffic control systems, provided TV transmitters and broadcasting systems to broadcasters and air-conditioning facilities for commercial and residential buildings.

The firm has also identified the Philippines as a strategic manufacturing center for its global storage market.

Toshiba officials were optimistic there remained a big market for storage technologies even if there was a growing shift from hard disk drives and solid state drives (SSDs) for personal computers and laptops to data centers and cloud solutions.

For its manufacturing facilities in Laguna, Toshiba was targeting to boost the flat $2 billion worth of sales it generated in 2015.

Toshiba’s facilities in Laguna have a total production capacity of 60 million units of hard disk drives and SSDs, which are being exported to the global market.

“If the market grows, we can still expand (our production capacity),” Doko said.