Most great manufacturers of consumer optical disk drive developers and manufacturers are based in Japan. Ricoh, Pioneer, Sony, Yamaha, Sanyo, Plextor, Teac, Mitsubishi (Verbatim), Mashushita (Panasonic), Mitsumi, Mitsui, and so on.

The largest providers are LG and Samsung, both based in Seoul, South Korea. Most of the next largest manufacturers are in the Greater China.

Philips in the Netherlands has the largest knowledge and technological background regarding optical technology so far.

All of them have markets and research facilities in the US.

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It seems to me natural that the strongest players in CD writers and DVD-Video players will also dominate DVD recordable market which will ultimately absorb both while stand-alone DVD recorders will also replace VHS, a non-computer format standard.

The two largest providers of DVD-RW drives have been Pioneer and Apple. One weakness of Pioneer is that it has almost zero CD-RW market share. Apple is a non-PC company almost by definition. (PC as developed by IBM and Microsoft.)

On the other hand, the inventor of DVD+RW, Philips has been the central force in both CD and DVD development while one of the best CD-RW drive manufacturers, Ricoh, makes DVD+RW drives. Microsoft is the richest PC company in the world, and HP is the largest one by market share and revenues. Philips and Ricoh do the job for DVD+RW as Pioneer does it for DVD-RW. Microsoft has chosen DVD+RW as the default DVD writing standard for Windows-based PC as Apple did the same with DVD-RW for its Macintosh. As Apple and Sony sells computers with factory-installed DVD-RW drives, HP and Dell (will) sell computers with factory-installed DVD+RW drives.

Pioneer's latest DVD-RW drives offer only 8x CD-R writing, 4x CD-RW writing, and 24x CD-ROM reading speeds compared to 12x CD-R writing, 8x CD-RW writing, and 32x CD-ROM reading speeds as offered by Ricoh's first-generation DVD+RW drives. Pioneer has no great experience in making CD writers for PC systems though it has sold a great many stand-alone DVD-Video players for the last few years. The way Pioneer develops technologies, builds factories, and markets products seems to be good for consumer video and audio products, but less effective in a more computer-oriented market sector of PC DVD writers. Sanyo has done much better with its invention of BURN-Proof and USB 2.0 40x CD writers. It will again leap ahead of Pioneer with faster writing and reading speeds, more buffer memory, and other better features.

At first, they were Philips and Sony that first released and marketed CD-R drives as they co-developed (though independently of each other in most cases) Compact Disc. Later, the market was divided among the pioneers and the rest. In the end, most market share went to China, Taiwan, and South Korea.

It will be similar with DVD writers. However, the corporate size of LiteOn, Acer (Acer includes AOpen and BenQ), Samsung, LG, and many others was much smaller five years and ten years ago. It is completely different from now on because they already have existing factories and development fund that can be relatively easily used to produce DVD writers and media. The continuing weakening of Apple, the success of Microsoft Windows, and the concluded merger processes between HP and Compaq will also have great impact upon the future DVD writer market.