Sankyo Seiki made a lot of parts for boombox manufacturers, in 1988 they were pumping out 4 million magnetic heads and 300,000 micro-motors, unbelievable!
Biz Times 1987 Sankyo Seiki Injecting $3M Into Local Operations. The largest customers are Philips, Sony and AIWA!
Philips D-8803, 1982 from The Straits Times (Singapore), price is in Singapore Dollars and a 2nd blurb in another issue....
Shirasuna Will Get Components in S'pore, 1979, BizTimes Shin-Shirasuna makes Silver Boomboxes, the article is confusing but I think the new company is just another branch.
There was a some turmoil around December of 1982 at Shin-Shirasuna, here's some related articles, some are almost reprints since they were so close together at the same paper. These are all from The Straits Times, Singapore
Walkmans Vs Compos, the debate never ends! The Straits Times, 1987 There's some great information in here including the break down in sales.
Ever since @Mister X started posting these articles from Singapore I have been wondering what they do there nowadays. I reckon that a large proportion of the Black Boomboxes from the late 1980s and early 1990s were made in Singapore. Both my Hitachi 3D and my Panasonic from that era were made there. Doing a bit of Googling I found this article from 2018 https://www.straitstimes.com/business/electronics-smes-urged-to-tap-regions-value-industry-40-tech which notes in the first paragraph "Will big global firms want to set up shop, as DBS senior economist Irvin Seah put it, "in a place that looks more like an old folks' home"?". I guess all the workers who were in their 20s back in 1981 stayed there. It seems that there is still some IC Fabrication done in Singapore but nothing like as much in Taiwan. I also suspect that quite a bit of production has moved over the border to Malaysia. Most of the Keysight (formerly HP) test instruments we have bought at work recently have been made there.
Monitor audio claim to be a British firm but are made in china i think, there still working good lol, one thing i will say about them, you can still get parts for 4 year old speakers which is great
One of the articles talked about how the companies would keep the high-end products manufactured in Japan. I haven't seen anything about import duties or quotas but that this market was huge for electronics. Radio Cassette Units seem to be the most popular thing to move manufacturing, it must have been a very hot product. Here's Toshiba looking for a few good women from 1984
AIWA was opening up it's third factory in 1988 in Singapore, here's companies offering congratulations, some of these might be subcontractors.
