Roland DG Corporation has announced the official opening of its first manufacturing factory in the Kingdom of Thailand. The factory is also the first outside of Japan. Located in Sinsakhon Printing City & Industrial Estate Phase 2, Samutsakhon, this new factory is expected to become the region's major production center outside of Japan. It will serve as the worldwide export hub for the group.

Masahiro Tomioka, President of Roland DG Corporation, Japan, said: "As the economic expansion in developing countries including Asia is expected to grow further in the mid to long term, we decided to establish a production base in Thailand so as to plan and manufacture products which meet the demand of developing countries. It was Thailand's good infrastructure and logistics, plus the availability of skilled labor, which made Thailand a very attractive destination for us. But more importantly, it was the presence of strong supporting industry network established through the efforts of the Thai government to attract companies to the region, and the investment incentives from The Thai Board of Investment (BOI) that made Thailand the location of choice for our global expansion."

The purpose of establishing a factory in Thailand is also to increase the number of manufacture and procurement facilities available. While Thailand experienced disastrous flooding two years ago, the damage incurred from the earthquake and tsunami that same year in Japan disrupted the supply chain, and even affected the procurement of parts for our products. Establishing manufacturing and procurement functions not only in Japan, but also overseas has merit from the viewpoint of cost and increasing price competitiveness, as well as holds merit on the point of risk reduction.

While there has been a recent slight easing in the strength of the yen, its sudden rise in value after the Lehman Shock required action; with procurement of parts in other currencies besides the Japanese yen being another purpose of this factory, allowing us to avoid foreign exchange risks. Furthermore, having become a group organization, our company is currently pushing ahead with its "Global One" reorganization in order to respond quickly and flexibly to meet increasingly complex global market and management environment changes. With this restructuring, the factory in Thailand will become a central base for operations in the region, and will be highly effective for responding quickly to the needs of developing countries and realizing prices demanded by the market. In the near future, it is expected that the factory will not only handle manufacturing and procurement functions, but also assume planning and design functions.

Roland DG ('DG' stands for 'Digital Group') was founded as a subsidiary of the electronic musical instrument maker Roland Corporation in 1981. The early 1980's marked the era when the personal computers were born, and were being developed by companies such as Apple, IBM, and NEC. Realizing the importance of computers to modern society, Roland decided to take advantage of the digital technology it had developed through the production of electronic instruments and applied it to computer peripherals in order to cultivate a new market, thus forming Roland DG.