TOKYO (04/27/2000) - Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. has chosen the U.S. as the location for two new research and development centers that will focus on Internet technologies.
The new laboratories will work closely with similar labs back in Japan and with local companies.
"We are establishing centers in the U.S. to closely work with local associations," said company spokesman Yoshihiro Kitadeya. "They will be a satellite operation from Japan. It is advantageous for us to locate some part of our R&D activities in the U.S. or other countries."
The first of the new labs, in Princeton, New Jersey, was opened on April 1 by Panasonic Technologies Inc. (PTI), a R&D subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial. It will work on products for business environments related to IP (Internet Protocol), in association with Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. Ltd., a Japan-based affiliate of the company.
A second lab, the Kyushu Matsushita Electric Research Laboratory, will work on IP-related technologies and products in areas such as wireless communications, and will open on May 1 in San Diego, California. The center will operate as a unit of PTI and work in cooperation with Kyushu Matsushita Electric Co. Ltd.
For Matsushita, the new labs bring to ten the number of R&D facilities it operates in the U.S. Other centers in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and California work in areas as diverse as advanced TV systems, plasma displays, DVD (digital versatile disc) encoding, industrial automation and speech technology.
Matsushita Electric Industrial, in Tokyo, can be found online at http://www.mei.co.jp/.