According to a Dataquest Japan survey, Apple Computer Inc was the only personal computer maker in Japan to increase its shipments in 1992 – increasing by 45.8% to 185,000 units and jumping up the market share league table to third place from sixth last year, taking 8.3% of the market, writes Anita Byrnes. The market share of NEC Corp, Japan’s top personal computer maker, still managed to grow, albeit by only 0.6% to 53.4%. Total shipments of personal computers declined 5.8% to 2.23m units. Fujitsu Ltd ranked second with a market share of 9.8%, followed by Toshiba Corp in fourth place with 7.6%. IBM Japan ranked fifth with 6.1%. In surveys of the retail outlets in Akihabara, a well-known electronics outlet area in Tokyo, the Macintosh LCIII and the Mac Colour Classic ranked in the top 10 most popular computers for sales in February, coming in at numbers six and nine respectively. The Macs are priced comparably with the other machines in the top 10, all of which are versions of the NEC 9800. With the US and European price war now boiling up in Japan, the picture for 1993 promises to alter significantly – and the availability of much cheaper personal computers is seen as a major opportunity for US software vendors. The potential is underlined by the fact that the US market, with just twice the population of Japan, absorbed about 10m personal computers last year, against the modest 2.2m sold in Japan – although the comparison is distorted by the fact that the dedicated word processor is still a major force in the Japanese market, and 2.24m Japanese-language word processors produced in 1992 according to the Electronics Industry Association of Japan, which means that combined sales for word processors and personal computers are much closer to parity with the US market. Makoto Naruke, president of Microsoft Corp’s Japanese subsidiary, told Reuter that he believes overall Japanese personal computer sales will increase 30% this year and on the back of this, he expects Microsoft’s sales in Japan just $108m in the year to June 31, 1992 – to rise to $136m in the year that ends this June.

Laboriously

Microsoft hopes that the launch of the Japanese version of Windows 3.1 will raise fiscal 1994 sales to $203m. Likely beneficiaries of a boom in personal computer sales include Lotus Development Corp, Microsoft and Borland International Inc, which together account for 90% of Japan’s spreadsheet market. A further revolution that has not yet taken hold widely in Japan is that of networking personal computers and word processors, and one American working for a large Japanese company in Tokyo complained to Reuter of hours spent every day hunting down paper documents written on dedicated word processors and then stuffing them laboriously into facsimile machines – when an efficent personal computer network could save all the effort. Japanese companies have amazing efficiency in manufacturing but this doesn’t apply to offices, he said.