Sony Makes 60,000 Discs Daily While Declaring Them Dead

There is a profound difference between something being obsolete and something being in managed decline. Sony's disc manufacturing operation in Thalgau, Austria represents the second.

The company's leadership is calling it the first—but the numbers tell a different story.

The plant currently produces 600,000 discs every day. By 2028, it will produce 60,000—a 90% reduction in volume while maintaining a significant ongoing operation with three shifts, workers. Revenue still flowing.

When Dietmar Tanzer, the president of Sony DADC, described the pivot, the framing was industrial inevitability: the disc is dead, the market has moved to streaming, technology ages out. But the factory is not closing—300 workers are being retrained to manufacture optical microlenses and other optical components, a shift requiring specific technical knowledge, capital investment in new tooling. A commitment to a facility that could have been abandoned entirely. This is how managed decline actually works in practice—not a clean narrative of disruption and replacement, but a negotiation between business strategy, labor stability. The sunk costs of existing infrastructure.

When you say something is "dead," you get to stop explaining the difficult middle part. You do not have to discuss retraining programs or whether those 300 workers will earn comparable wages in optics manufacturing, whether optical microlenses represent a genuine new market or are themselves a transitional product waiting for the next disruption.