PMDC, USA

About PMDC, USA

PMDC, USA was PolyGram's compact-disc manufacturing plant at 700 South Battleground Avenue in Grover, near Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Discogs records the company as incorporated as PMDC, Inc. on 18 June 1992, renamed PolyGram Manufacturing and Distribution Centers, Inc. on 2 November 1992, and renamed again to UMG Manufacturing & Logistics Inc. on 30 September 1999; the discs it pressed are credited "Made in USA by PMDC" and carry the mastering SID codes IFPI L005, L006, L007 and L009 and mould SID codes beginning IFPI 03, which the successor inherited.^[1] The PMDC name itself marked PolyGram's ownership of its pressing plants, and Grover was the first of them to take it, in June 1992, before the Dutch, German and French plants in 1993 and the British one in 1996; each carried a national credit and its own mould SID block, 03xx being this one.^[2]

The plant had opened as PDO, USA, the American arm of Philips and Du Pont Optical, and traded under that name from December 1986 until PolyGram took it over in June 1992, which is why early PMDC discs are hard to tell from late PDO ones.^[3] In 1998 Seagram bought PolyGram from Philips and merged it with Universal Music Group; the deal comprised the global pressing and distribution network, the Kings Mountain plant included, so the company passed to Universal while keeping the PMDC name for another year.^[4] Under its later name it stayed with Universal until 2005, when Glenayre Technologies agreed to buy Universal's manufacturing operations in Grover.^[5] PolyGram ran a separate PMDC plant at Louviers in France, which has its own entry here; the two were sister manufacturing subsidiaries trading under one name in different countries, not one company.^[2]