No More Nikons

Nikon issued the following press release end of October:

This is to advise you, following our first notice of October 11, of the latest situations of submersion at Nikon (Thailand) Co., Ltd., a consolidated manufacturing subsidiary of Nikon Corporation in the Rojana Industrial Park in Ayutthaya Province located in Central Thailand.

Damages
The 1st floor of all buildings at the premises are presently submerged and the water level is as high as around 2 meters and there arose no remarkable change since October 12. Operation of the factory has been suspended since October 6. It is reported that there is no human damage.

Estimated impact to our business performance
We still have difficulty to grasp the overall damages of our equipment and facility since access to the premises continues to be prohibited. We are now continuing our utmost to estimate the impact of the flood to our group companies and business performance. We assure you to immediately advise our findings once it is judged there will be an important change in our forecast.

Recovery
We are unable to define how soon operation will be resumed. It will take a certain time before the situation normalizes including completion of water pumping out from the Rojana Industrial Park. We have set up support system under the Emergency Headquarters for Disaster Control headed by the president and will endeavor to restart the operation as early as possible. Every possible measure is now under preparation to resume production by means as purchase of new manufacturing equipment, review of production assignment among whole Nikon group companies. As for drainage from the industrial park, we are requesting its acceleration to the Thai government, together with the Rojana Industrial Park authority, other companies in the Park and Japan External Trade Organization.

We deeply apologize you for any inconvenience caused by the disaster such as short supply of our products.

Translation? You will be waiting quite some time for any new Nikons. And it may be very difficult to find stock on a lot of existing Nikon products over the next few months.

The only integrated Nikon assembly and small fab that hasn’t been affected by the earthquake and tsunami in March and by the flooding in Thailand in October is the Wuxi plant in China. Most of the 1 Nikon and 1 Nikkor products are made in Wuxi with some dependency on Thailand and Japan.