Sony Optiarc

» see sony-optiarc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Almost nobody ever bought one of these on purpose. Optiarc made the slot in the side of the laptop, and it supplied Dell and Apple among others, so around the turn of the 2010s an enormous number of computers had its hardware inside them and almost none of their owners could have named the company. You read the brand on the laptop. The drive underneath had a model number like AD-5970H and you met it only when something jammed.

It was built to be the biggest. Sony and NEC signed a memorandum in November 2005 to merge their optical drive businesses, which between them had turned over about 220 billion yen in the previous financial year, and Sony NEC Optiarc was registered on 3 April 2006, Sony holding 55 percent against NEC's 45, with about 350 staff between them. In September 2008 Sony bought out NEC's share and on 5 December the name shortened to Sony Optiarc. Its best year was 2008, when IDC put it third in the world at 15.6 percent, behind the Hitachi-LG and Toshiba-Samsung ventures.

The drive did not get worse. It got cheap enough that nobody needed Sony to make it. The average worldwide OEM price of a DVD burner was $30 in 2007 and $23 by 2009, and when Sony confirmed the exit in August 2012 its spokesman Jin Tomihari put it in one line: it had become the situation that almost anyone can manufacture optical drives. He added the other half, which was that products without drives, like smartphones and tablets, were growing more popular. A Gartner analyst noted the same week that DVD drives had fallen below fifty dollars.

~ the record ~

~ what the name meant ~

The company explained itself on its own homepage, in a panel about the origin of the word. Opti, it said, was for optical and for the Latin prefix meaning the best. Arc was for archive and for arch, meaning top-ranking, number one. Then the sentence that gives this page its reason to exist: "Our aim is to become the number one supplier in the optical disc drive industry."

That panel was still on the front page in February 2013. By then it was sitting directly above a notice, posted on 28 December 2012, which said the company would end its business at the end of March 2013, thanked customers for their patronage, and informed them that the homepage itself would close on 31 March. Both texts were visible at once for three months.

~ who actually built them ~

Optiarc mostly did not manufacture anything. A lawyer's opening statement in a Wisconsin patent trial in November 2009 laid out the arrangement more plainly than any press release ever did: Quanta Storage of Taiwan assembled the drives, Sony Optiarc helped design them, Sony Optiarc put its brand on them, and Sony Optiarc sold them to companies you have heard of. For several years Quanta Storage had one main customer, and it was Optiarc.

The economist Kenneth Flamm worked out why a venture like this existed at all. By 2008 the royalties owed to the DVD patent pools on a recorder came to about $17 a unit, roughly 68 percent of what the thing sold for, and the pools accounted for most of what it cost a newcomer to build a drive. Sony was a pool member. A majority-Sony joint venture could assemble drives without paying full freight on the patents, which was the actual asset. When the hardware became worth less than the royalty stack, there was nothing underneath.

~ the shell years ~

Operations ceased on 31 March 2013 and the corporation did not. It filed accounts every June with sales of zero yen, carrying an accumulated deficit of 42.25 billion yen. In October 2015 the European Commission fined Sony and Sony Optiarc a combined 30.8 million euros for rigging optical drive tenders run by Dell and HP, a cartel whose members, Margrethe Vestager noted, had met in car parks and cinemas outside Europe. The dead company appealed, and on 16 June 2022 the Court of Justice annulled the part of the decision that had held Sony Optiarc liable. In July 2021 the registered address had been moved to Sony's head office in Minato. The shareholders resolved to dissolve on 13 October 2023, the dissolution notice ran in the Official Gazette three days later, and the national tax register closed the entry on 9 January 2024.

The name got out alive, by accident. Sony let the American trademark lapse, it was formally cancelled in October 2014 for want of a declaration of use, and it died in July 2016. Thirty-two days later a disc-duplicator company in Alhambra, California called Vinpower filed for the mark itself and got it. Today sony-optiarc.com redirects to optiarcinc.com, where you can buy an Optiarc DVD burner, and the product page opens with the words "OPTIARC IS BACK!"

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