There\u2019s a good chance your Instagram photos are making money for Japanese ball-bearings manufacturer Minebea Mitsumi Inc.<\/p>\n
The Tokyo-based company, which counts Apple Inc. as one of its main customers,\u00a0makes various components used in data centers. That includes ball bearings in hard drives and cooling fans, which are in high demand as the world generates, processes and stores more information.<\/p>\n
As everything from refrigerators to self-driving cars throw off information that needs to be uploaded to the cloud, data centers will be housing 1.3 zettabytes (1.3 trillion gigabytes) by 2021, more than double from this year, according to Cisco Systems Inc..<\/p>\n
That\u2019s helped Minebea, which this month lifted its earnings outlook for the third straight quarter on strong sales of data center-related parts. Valued at almost $10 billion, Minebea is also benefiting from the success of Nintendo Co.\u2019s Switch console, which is assembled by Mitsumi, a unit acquired last year. The company\u2019s stock doubled in 2017.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg News sat down with Chief Financial Officer Hiromi Yoda to talk about earnings growth, Nintendo, and what the zettabyte era means for his company.<\/p>\n
The demand for ball bearings is very strong and we\u2019re increasingly eating through our inventory. Demand from data centers in particular is very strong.\u00a0We\u2019re quite surprised by growth of fan motors for cooling data centers. It\u2019s not enough to have one data center, but you need backups. And then a backup for your backup. The data you see on Instagram and other services, that keeps increasing. People aren\u2019t deleting their photos. And we\u2019re very thankful for that.<\/p>\n
We still have capacity to increase by 15 million bearings annually by using space in existing factories in Thailand, which will bring capacity to 300 million by May or June. But it is becoming necessary to invest in new factories. We\u2019re considering possible locations.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve already invested 8 billion yen in expanding capacity, but that was within existing locations. To build infrastructure for a brand-new factory requires a number that has an extra digit. That\u2019s why we have to consider it very seriously.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t speak about short-term earnings, but when we laid out our medium-term plan last May we expected operating profit to reach 100 billion yen by March 2021. It\u2019s beginning to look like we can arrive at that number a year early.<\/p>\n
Our customer is doing very well. We won\u2019t know next fiscal year\u2019s numbers until March. But we\u2019re not a supplier, we\u2019re an assembler. We can deal with bigger demand and won\u2019t need additional investment.<\/p>\n
The increase in efficiency is going faster than expected. The business is doing better as our customer is selling more units, but also because of our improved profitability.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re actually doing better than expected. People make a big deal about how great OLED is, but\u00a0it\u2019s hard to see the screen in daylight. And if you put three OLED screens next to each other, they\u2019ll all show slightly different colors. LCD isn\u2019t going to go away completely.<\/p>\n
Your Instagram photos are making money for Japanese ball-bearings manufacturer Minebea Mitsumi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":193070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[48977,22807],"class_list":["post-249211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud-hosting","tag-ball-bearings","tag-data-centres"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249213,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249211\/revisions\/249213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}