Last Typewriter Factory Closing

Apr 27, 2011, 13:22 by John Steele

The world's last remaining typewriter factory, Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai, India, is closing, PC Magazine reported Tuesday. Although losing favor in the West, many Indian people still used typewriters up until a few years ago.

The factory, which just a decade ago produced 50,000 typewriters a year, a third of India's total output of 150,000 units, stopped production in 2009 and its dwindling inventory is down to just 500 machines. According to PC Mag, most of these are Arabic models.

"From the early 2000s onward, computers started dominating," Godrej & Boyce's general manager of operations Milind Dukle told the Business Standard. "All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us. [Until] 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year."