The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on October 4 that Matsushita, Hitachi, and Pioneer have jointly developed a PDP which has a power consumption half that of existing PDPs, resulting from a new technology which increases the panel's light-emitting efficiency. As power consumption has been a weak point of PDPs in comparison with LCD panels, the newly announced model is expected to improve competitiveness of PDPs against LCD panels. Also, the companies have found a way to significantly reduce manufacturing costs for the panel to only a third of that for current PDPs.