Nikon targets to produce 30,000 units of D800 per month

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SENDAI (Japan): Japan’s Nikon Corporation, one of the world’s top camera producers, is targeting to produce 30,000 units of D800 and 5,000 units of D4 camera models, the company’s latest, per month at its factory here.

The cameras were launched worldwide early this year with the D4 variant on Jan 6 and the D800 only three days ago.

The Sendai factory, located about 360 kilometers from Tokyo and six kilometres from Sendai’s coastal area that was hit by a tsunami following a 9.0 Richter scale earthquake on March 11 last year, is the only Nikon factory worldwide producing the D800 and D4 models.

Although the factory escaped the tsunami as the flood waters flowed only three km inland, it was however badly damaged by the earthquake, and the company had to spend about US$100 million to repair it, Sendai Nikon President Jiro Saito told visiting Southeast Asia media representatives here.

He said the big earthquake here and the flooding of another Nikon plant in Thailand last October had badly affected the production of several variants of Nikon cameras worldwide.

However, he said, with the help of Nikon personnel from its overseas offices and plants, the Sendai factory was quickly repaired and it fully resumed production after just three weeks in April.

He added the factory was lucky as none of its workers was injured during the earthquake.

With the current 1,600 workers, the factory is producing one unit of camera per minute on a daytime shift with each unit of the D800 variant produced every four hours and the D4 variant every five hours.

Saito said the Sendai factory, which also produced the D3x and F6 variants, still sources some components for the camera production from Nikon overseas plants including Nikon China.

Some 1,600 component parts are needed to produce each of the D800 and D4 cameras, the 30-odd media representatives from Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia were told when they toured the Sendai factory. –Bernama