LG plasma plant opens on Thursday

We told you yesterday of LG's super-secret plot to rule the PDP market. Today, we're beginning to see how they plan to implement the take-over. After two months of trial runs, a new LG plasma plant opens up on September 1st. The new plant has cost over $638 million, but will almost double LG's plasma panel output.

Currently LG manufactures 190,000 PDP panels per month. The addition of the new plant will increase that total to 350,000 panels per month. That's a staggering amount considering we recently saw Samsung report almost one billion dollars in LCD monthly sales. It took 8.2 million LCDs to hit that number, so LG's plasma numbers are far behind. Doubling your output of a sought after commodity, however, is nothing to sneeze at.

LG will be increasing efficiencies by cutting eight panels from each pane of glass. This helps reduce the number of manufacturing processes and provides other cost-efficient benefits as well. Let's hope that LG passes along some of that cost savings on to the consumers with lower PDP pricing in the future.