Originally posted by monochrome Do you think JIP will sell the manufacturing facilities and transfer all the assembly employees and tools to an acquirer? That would keep the Olympus products alive and retain the brand identifiers and patents as well as the high-value design employees. Or would they also sell the designers and retain just the ownership rights?
There is only one facility involved with Olympus Imaging products since Olympus moved their production from China to Vietnam. It's a multi-products facility currently manufacturing products for the three business segments of Olympus: Medical, Scientific Solutions and Imaging.
This was the whole point of Imaging transferring their manufacturing from China to Vietnam: to let go of a dedicated factory, which had become much too big and therefore too costly considering the decline in sales and consequently in production numbers, and use a flexible 'internal contractor' than can allocate resources and space according to needs.
For practical reasons I don't see Olympus putting a fence around a small part of their Vietnamese factory and transfer this space to JIP. For the same reasons that led to the transfer from dedicated production plant to multi-products, shared production plant (volume contraction, including in the future), I don't see JIP interested in acquiring a production plant. Besides, they systematically contract manufacturing to third parties in their other ventures.
My guess is therefore that JIP will outsource the manufacturing to Olympus, at least for an interim period. Later on, as they have done with their other investments, I guess they will rely on an ODM (or several ODMs) for both R&D and manufacturing.