Fuji proudly displays the "Made in Japan" stamp on their cameras. With the introduction of new entry level models (X-M1) and the upcoming even cheaper X-A1 camera, the company is looking to cut production costs and diversify risk (remember the last major earthquake in Japan?) by outsourcing production to other countries. Today Fujifilm announced that they opened a new lens factory in the Philippines:
Fujifilm has established a new factory in the Philippines where logistics and other infrastructures are well developed and it is rich in young, talented workforce, so as to enhance the production capacity of optical lenses. The new factory will offer an integrated production process from the polishing, coating and other processing procedures to the assembling of optical lenses. Construction began in November 2012 and production started in late May 2013, shortening the original tight construction period to less than 7 months in total. Today, it started full-scale mass production. At the new factory, new production equipment, such as the "lens polishing machine" which polishes the surface of glass lenses with high precision at nano levels, and the "vacuum evaporation machine" which forms multilayer thin films for antireflection will be introduced for the production of high-performance lenses of digital cameras, projectors and surveillance cameras.
By enhancing the production capacity step by step, Fujifilm intends to increase the number of employees to 600 and the production to 18 million lenses a year by FY2015, so as to respond to the growing demand for optical lenses. The total investment for the new factory is 2.3 billion yen.
