Tokyo — Olympus will be the first Japanese digital camera company to build a digital camera factory in Vietnam, according to a report in Nikkei.
The move is meant to shift the concentration of camera production out of China, the publication said, and to take advantage of Vietnam’s lower labor costs. The factory is expected to be completed by 2009 and will initially be dedicated to compact cameras but will eventually expand into SLR models as well, Nikkei reported.
Once complete, Olympus will consolidate its two Chinese factories into a single building at a total cost of roughly $88 million.