Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. (Osaka, Japan) and Sankyo Seiki Manufacturing Co. (Tokyo, Japan) have formed a joint venture to manufacture a new generation of disk drive spindle motors using hydrodynamic bearings.

Sankyo Seiki will produce the Matsushita-designed motors at its plant in the Philippines. Matsushita will buy all of the production.

One of the first companies to develop the technology, Sankyo Seiki started using fluid dynamic bearings back in 1993; volume commercial production began in 1997.

Hydrodynamic, or fluid-film, bearings are rapidly displacing ball bearings in the key market for disk drive motors. Over 188 million disk drives were manufactured in 2000. That number is expected to grow quickly as disk drives find their way into more and more consumer devices such as video recorders.

The agreement also shows the Philippines is becoming an important bearing manufacturing location. Koyo, NTN, and now Sankyo have all recently constructed, or are in the process of building, fluid film bearing manufacturing facilities in the Philippines.