Company will spend $500 million on manufacturing center for 3.5-inch drives Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. is planning to spend up to $500 million to build a hard-disk drive manufacturing center in China, the company said Monday.Construction is expected to begin late this year with the start of commercial production scheduled for late 2005, said Glenn Larnerd, chief operating officer of Hitachi GST. The new plant will manufacture hard-disk drives and initially work on 3.5-inch drives, he said.Hitachi already operates a hard-disk drive component manufacturing plant in Shenzhen, producing components such as magnetic recording heads, and expects a new disk media factory to begin production at the end of this year. Additionally, it also sources many of the components used in the drives from companies in the Shenzhen area. These parts are currently shipped to factories in the Philippines or Thailand for final assembly, and the new Shenzhen factory will move the manufacturing much closer to the component supply, Larnerd said.The geographical closeness to supplies as well as a growing number of customers in China were the main reasons behind choosing Shenzhen, he said. The new plant won’t mean the closure of Hitachi’s facilities in the Philippines and Thailand, he added.When complete, the new factory is expected to employ around 7,000 workers. Hitachi GST was formed in early 2003 when Hitachi Ltd. bought IBM Corp.’s storage operations. It is a major manufacturer of hard-disk drives for several market sectors including the one-inch drives used in several models of digital music player. It also led the 2.5-inch disk market in the first quarter of this year with a share of 45 percent, according to figures from Gartner Inc. Technology IndustryData Management