Asahi Glass To Build Y10bn Chinese Plant

TOKYO (Nikkei)--Asahi Glass Co.  on Wednesday announced plans to build a processing plant for glass substrates for LCD panels in China's Guangdong Province by the summer of 2012.

The company will invest around 10 billion yen to build the facility in Shenzhen. The new plant will handle polishing and cutting of large, eighth-generation glass substrates. In March, the Asahi Glass group established a wholly owned subsidiary in Shenzhen capitalized at 2.2 billion yen.

This will be Asahi's second glass substrate processing plant in China, joining an existing one in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province. The new facility's production capacity has not been announced but is expected to initially be around the same as the one in Kunshan.

The move is in preparation for panel makers' entrance into China. Major LCD panel manufacturers have announced plans to build production sites in the country, including Sharp Corp.  South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Display Co., and Taiwan's AU Optronics Corp. In addition, Corning Inc. of the U.S. has unveiled plans to build a plant that can manufacture and process 8.5-generation glass substrates.