Lake Forest disk drive maker Western Digital Corp. is set to invest $1.2 billion in the next five years to expand its manufacturing operations in Malaysia, according to reports.
The company is set to build a 1.5 million-square-foot building for manufacturing disk drive parts and for research and development, according to a report from the government of Malaysia.
A spokesperson for Western Digital confirmed the report but declined to comment further.
The announcement comes after Chief Executive John Coyne, who goes by the honorary title of “Datuk” in Malaysia, met with Prime Minister Seri Najib Tun Razak in Washington, D.C., earlier this week.
“Western Digital chose Malaysia for this latest expansion following the success of its operations here over the last 38 years,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.
Construction is set to be complete by the third quarter of 2011. The facility will add capacity slowly in the next few years.
The new buildings are set to add some 10,000 jobs in Malaysia, where Western Digital already employs roughly 19,000 workers.
Western Digital’s disk drives are used in desktop PCs, notebooks, portable storage devices, corporate networks and other consumer electronics.
It has invested some $2.5 billion to date in building up its Malaysian operations, the government said.
In a cost cutting move last year, the company sold a plant in Malaysia to Japan’s Hitachi Ltd. for undisclosed terms.
The factory made what are called media substrates, the underlying part of a disk that stores data within a drive. The substrate production was moved to another plant there.
Western Digital had a recent market value of $7.5 billion.
