Taiyo Yuden has officially announced plans to withdraw from the CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc manufacturing business, as the optical storage market continues to shrink. The Japanese company plans to stop selling DVD-R/+R, CD-R and BD-R media by the end of the year.

Taiyo Yuden has been the market leader for optical recording media driven by products such as CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R etc. and critical market solutions since the development of the CD-R in 1988. The Company has promoted optical recording media as one of its core businesses.

During the last 5 years, despite increasingly competition from overseas manufacturers, it had continued to provide the market with high-quality products and had received high acclaim from countless users for offering reliable Japanese optical recording media.However, as the larger storage capacity of hard disc drives (HDDs) and the use of cloud computing is driving changing market conditions, the market for optical media products has been diminishing.

To respond to this trend, the Taiyo Yuden has striven to improve profitability by accelerating its cost reduction efforts, enhancing productivity and promoting the archiving business. However, as a result of market shrinkage exceeding the company’s expectations as well as the effects of the hike of raw material prices etc., Taiyo Yuden has determined that it would be difficult to further improve earnings and thus decided to withdraw from the recording media business altogether.

Sales of the company's optical media products in the year ended March 31, 2015fell to ¥12,859 million, which is 9.6% lower as compared with the previous fiscal year.

Taiyo company developed the world's first CD-R in 1988. Ten years later, it released its first 4.7GB DVD-R in Japan under its "That's" brand. In 2008, TY released a BD-R LTH disc based on an organic dye recording layer, and started working with Victor Advanced Media (JVC). In addition, TY established START Lab in 1989, in a joint venture Sony Corp. The company was selling the popular product lines such as That's consumer media, the That's CD-R/DVD-R for master product line, and the CD/DVD error checkers (ES-50, ES-70, ES-1000 rebranded Almedio model).