The fourth largest manufacturer of recordable media in the world, Prodisc, announced today that it has made a request to a local Taiwanese court for emergency measures to temporarily prevent its creditors from seizing its assets. The Taiwanese company also announced that it will leave the market for recordable media and blames Dutch Royal Philips.
Prodisc is having legal disputes with Philips, which has demanded that Prodisc discs can no longer be exported from Taiwan until the company has paid it royalities. Philips also seized a few factories and four containers with recordable media in the harbour of Rotterdam.
Where Prodisc blames Philips, Philips has told the court that it has withdrawn its demand for a provisional seizure of Prodisc's bank deposits and factory buildings and signed a memorandum of understanding to continue royalty negotiations, however Prodisc has failed to fulfill its obligation and has continued to infringe Philips' patents.
The company has nearly 283 million dollar in outstanding debts and will now exit the recordable media business. The company was heavily competing with its largest competitors CMC, Ritek and Moser Baer India and had a marketshare of about 11%. It's expected that the exit of Prodisc could cool down the overheated recordable media market with low margins resulted from more supply than demand.
While I'm not a huge Prodisc fan, I see this as bad news. The less competition and variety of recordable media there are, the worse off consumers are.
I think it's great news. Prodisc has been thumbing it's nose at Philips for years. Cheap media? yes: Because they have not been paying royalities on CD-R media. Good for the consumer? Yes because now perhaps some profit can be made. If you have not noticed Ritek and CMC (and Prodisc) having been losing money for years. This does not lead to better products. All three have been trying to put each other out of business in a price war that has been the demise of many other manufacturers.
Well, it just goes to show that, It's not only BD that requires royalties.
As for Prodisc. If they go down then it has to be bad for consumers IMO. Less choice and less competition.
Well, Unfortunately, Prodisc is one of the cheap-yet-good quality DVD Suppliers, Mainly PRODISC R04 and R05, which've proven to be quite cheap with really great scans, i wouldn't have felt any sympathy if it was Ritek or PRINCO who's gone out of business, but not Prodisc 
...
well... i think we have to say goodbye to SmartBuy
And what about Philips!? all their branded media (the ones i've tested at least) were some of the lower grade CMC dyes!! Oh cmon!!!
R.I.P. Prodisc
Philips is all Research & Development now, they don't actually produce mass quantities of recordable media themselves any more. They just collect their royalties. 
Happy Birthday to you 
