Japan’s personal computer market is estimated to grow 30% to total around 7.5 million units in terms of shipments in fiscal 1996, with the growth rate falling about 70% from the estimate for this fiscal year, according to a forecast released by NEC Corp., Fujitsu Ltd. and other personal computer makers. Although the growth rate is still relatively high, the fall in growth is likely to hurt earnings of Japanese producers of electronics, industry sources said. The projected slowing of the fiscal 1996 expansion rate is mainly because most of the people who tend to purchase new products or who had waited for a chance to replace their old PCs are believed to have bought new PCs in the previous year. Meanwhile, the 1996 growth rate of the U.S. PC market is projected to fall nearly 10 percentage points from last year to around 15%.
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