After more than 50 years of business, Hitachi announced that it will move its LCD and plasma television production outside Japan this October, in a further sign that the strong yen and foreign competition are hitting the domestic technology industry hard — particularly TV manufacturers. A spokesman for the company said "We can't expect the domestic TV market to grow much, and price competition is getting more and more intense." The division's employees will transfer from Hitachi Consumer Electronics (CE) to Hitachi Consumer Marketing (Hitachi CM), and the company says it still plans to sell TVs made by OEM contractors outside Hitachi Group.

Hitachi is the latest in a long line of Japanese TV companies to struggle in the market over recent years, with the soaring yen causing high production costs and low returns on overseas sales relative to Korean and, lately, Chinese competition.