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Wall Street Journal runs a story on Japanese electronics factories "diversifying" into running greenhouses.
Struggling to compete with rivals in South Korea or China in businesses like televisions and smartphones, a range of Japanese electronics giants are converting idled factories to agriculture.
Last month, as Fujitsu began selling lettuce from the Aizu-Wakamatsu plant, Toshiba Corp said it would begin growing vegetables inside a floppy disk factory near Tokyo that hasn't been used for two decades. Later this year, Panasonic Corp will start selling computer-program controlled greenhouses to grow spinach and other vegetables. And Sharp Corp last year began laboratory tests to grow strawberries at an indoor site in Dubai using its lighting and air-purifying technologies.
Because the lettuce is grown in a bacteria-free space, it keeps much longer than ordinary produce - up to two months if refrigerated, the company says. "Because it stays fresh for so long, this will give us a competitive edge when we ship it for export," says Akihiko Sato, a manager at the plant, showing that an economic model honed during the days of the transistor radio, when overseas sales fuelled growth, retains its appeal. But high-tech lettuce comes at a price. At a supermarket near Tokyo, a small bag of Fujitsu lettuce was selling for $3, about $1 more than a whole head of ordinary lettuce.
Fujitsu is starting modestly, with production of 3,500 heads of lettuce a day, but says that if all goes well, it intends to produce about $4 million worth by the 2016 fiscal year, up from a goal of $1.5 million this year.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @01:53AM
With all due respect to your post, none of these is on the same scale as Fujitsu selling lettuce. Except perhaps Samsung (in reverse).
Playing card -> videogames have entertainment in common.
Textile company -> cars... okay, this one is a bit out there, but cars do have plenty of textiles in them, and they still have in common the type of industrial area/building they can be manufactured in.
Ceramics -> electronics, they started making ceramic packages for other companie's actual electronics so there is a continuum
Shipping firm selling everything -> Typical diversification
Bookstore selling servers -> Amazon stopped being a bookstore a while ago, see previous point
Mail company -> credit cards has geographically wide business relationships in common (it's easy to forget in the Internet era that this was far from a trivial thing back then)
Gunpowder -> GMO seeds have chemistry in common
Textile -> insurance.. when a manufacturing company turns to less hands-on things they still reuse many things
Noodles -> electronics... okay, no comment.
Tiffany: From wiki: "Founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young[6] in New York City in 1837 as a "stationery and fancy goods emporium"" -- jewelry is definitely "fancy goods", and even then, both things are the same type of product (crafts) even if with very different purposes
Textile -> ponies -> robots in that order is a continuum, it's not like they jumped straight from textile to robots and, even then, see Toyota
But hard drives (and other metal things) -> lettuce? They have no materials in common, they have no distribution channels in common, they have no production expertise in common (unlike, say, Fujifilm and antioxidants), they have no industrial machinery or geographical area in common (small metal stuff is usually made in industrial parks in the middle of cities, lettuce is from rural areas)...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @04:47AM
Most of your analysis is really disingenuous, like your rationalization for Berkshire Hathaway as "reuse" - isn't that exactly what's going on here?
Lets see you rationalize how going from manufacturing shoe leather to building game consoles [wikipedia.org] is unremarkable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @06:15AM
"Most of your analysis is really disingenuous, like your rationalization for Berkshire Hathaway as "reuse" - isn't that exactly what's going on here?"
No. It's one thing to go into something that reuses something you have and requires "little" else, and it's another thing to go into something that requires a large amount of new skills and assets. When you're used to manufacturing precision-cut electromechanical devices that involve nasty chemicals and big machines you don't simply go on to grow edible plants meant for human consumption.
"Lets see you rationalize how going from manufacturing shoe leather to building game consoles is unremarkable."
It is unremarkable because they didn't go from manufacturing shoe leather to building game consoles. First they started making leather craft-related stuff, which was very much related to the shoe leather business. Then they got involved in plastic moulding, which is related to what they were doing with leather, only with a different material. This type of plastic moulding led them to making toys (wiki mentions wading pools), note that this was some 10 years before the game consoles. By the time they entered the game console market they were established as a toy maker, and from toys to game consoles is not a big leap at all -- game consoles are toys. They continued making toys after they exited the game console market.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @08:48AM
> No. It's one thing to go into something that reuses something you have and requires "little" else,
Yes, not using equipment that's been idle for years, if not outright sold off long ago, requires a whole lot of work.
> game consoles are toys
Its like you are playing word association. Except that you choose to deliberately suck at association for the stuff you don't like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @12:35PM
Feel free to use the blockquote tag to properly mark the quotes guys, thank you.
(Score: 2) by lx on Friday July 11 2014, @12:00PM
Noodles to electronics seems like a logical step [imgur.com] to me.