Company Name: Ampex Ferrotec Limited

Year of Founding: 1961

Mainstream Products: computer core memory, hard disc, audio-video equipment

Brief History:

Ampex Ferrotec Limited (“Ampex Ferrotec”) was established in 1961. It is owned by Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company, which was in turn founded in California, USA, in 1944. In the beginning, Ampex Ferrotec produced magnetic core memory for computers. Its clients were mostly European or Japanese electronics enterprises. With 3,800 workers at its prime, the company was an industry leader in terms of both production and management. It was renowned as the “capital” of Hong Kong electronic industry because it had trained a lot of specialists. In the early 1970s, Ampex Ferrotec set up an engineering department (or design department) which comprised four sub-departments producing magnetic core memory, stack, graphs and charts respectively. It developed new products for clients in the Far East, Europe as well as America. In the late 1970s, Ampex Ferrotec began developing hard discs and audio/visual electronic products, at the same time introducing foreign high-tech products such as the Rodime Winchester Drive from Scotland and Sony Betacam from Japan. This raised the bar in Hong Kong’s local electronic industry. After the 1980s, Ampex Ferrotec started to lose its technological advantage and was overtaken by its competitors such as Intel, Fairchild and Sony. Finally, the factory was closed in the mid-1990s.