Japan’s Ministry of International Trade & Industry is still trying to forestall further protests from the US by making an effort to get local firms to buy more foreign chips: this week it called in representatives of about 90 big Japanese chip users, 60 distributors and 20 foreign suppliers to make it clear that it is the government’s wish to see the semiconductor trade imbalance reduced; the Japanese are buying many more chips from the US, but the market has expanded so much in the last couple of years that although US sales have tripled, US firms’ market share has risen only to 11% from the 8.6% of 1986.
