According to Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation’s (DADC) CEO, the PlayStation owner is already hard at work repurposing and restructuring at least one of its disc manufacturing facilities in Austria, following the announcement on July 1st that Sony is set to end the production of both first-party and third-party physical PlayStation discs by January, 2028.
This news comes straight from Sony DADC’s CEO, Dietmar Tanzer, during an interview with ORF Salzburg (via The Verge). According to Tanzer, Sony is already repurposing the factory and retraining the 300 employees at the Sony DADC facility in Thalgau, Austria, as it plans to transform it into a “micro-lens” production facility.
And, according to Sony DADC’s Head of Micro Optics, Markus Streibl, this shift had been planned before Sony’s announcement earlier this week. While the 300 employees at the Thalgau, Austria, factory learned of Sony’s shift to digital at the same time as the general public, the factory’s management revealed that it had received a 30 million euro (roughly 34 million dollars) investment in optical microlens production before the July 1st announcement.
While there are plans in place to retrain the 300 employees at the Thalgau factory, and Sony DADC has already started withdrawing some of these workers from disc production for microlens “test operations,” Tanzer couldn’t confirm if their jobs would be at risk in the near future. When asked by ORF Salzburg whether the 300 workers at the Austrian factory would retain their jobs after Sony fully winds down physical media production, Tanzer reportedly stressed that Sony wants to keep the number as close to 300 as possible, but seemingly made no promises.
But the bad news doesn’t stop there, as stated by Sony DADC’s Head of Micro Optics, Sony is already planning to mass-produce optical microlenses on a company-wide scale as early as 2027, which more than implies that the Thalgau, Austria factory is only the first step in converting all of Sony DADC’s factories.