With more or less all the figures for Japan’s fiscal 1988 to March 31 – over there it’s called fiscal 1987 – now in, the Nikkei Sangyoo Shimbun newspaper has done some sums and come up with a summary of the market position and any movements of the leading firms in each sector of the computer market. In mainframes it finds that there has been no change in the relative market shares over the past financial year, despite increases in the overall number of installations due to a rise in domestic demand. At March 31, number one installed base by value was held by IBM Japan with 24.6%; Fujitsu was just behind with 23.5%; Hitachi had 17.7%; NEC 17.1%; Nippon Unisys, 10.5%; others shared 6.6%. For the business computer market, the paper turned to statistics from the Japan Electronics Industry Promotion Association, which reckons that the business computer sector saw double-digit growth in 1987. Growth was healthy at the low end of the market, among machines costing under Y?3m – that’s $24,000 – which showed growth of 15.1%, but the star performers were machines in the $24,000 to $60,000 price bracket, which saw growth of 30.1%. Themes for the year were networking, with business computers being used as servers in a network, and also an increase in use of the systems for office automation by small and medium-sized business. The market is dominated by Fujitsu and NEC, with shares of 24.8% and 23.7% respectively; Toshiba has 10.1%; IBM 8.7% – Systems 36 and 38; Mitsubishi 8.5%; while others share the remaining 24.2% of the base. Toshiba lap-tops In the personal computer sector, despite the rows with Uncle Sam which led to a fall in exports, domestic demand was strong enough to mop up the surplus – although many manufacturers began making machines for export markets outside Japan, so that their domestic production figures were were correspondingly. Toshiba Corp increased its share of the markety significantly thanks to the runaway success of the Toshiba laptops, and despite reduced exports to the US, it was able to increase its share of shipments to Europe, ending up in third place overall. Seiko Epson, previously in fifth place, moved its manufacturing of US-oriented exports to the US and Korea, and consequently dropped to sixth place in terms of Japan manufactures. Since the start of calendar year 1988, Seiko has increased its production of NEC compatible machines, and this is likely to be a trend in 1988; however, the advent of the AX standard – based on the IBM AT design with Japanese language processing – manufactured by Sanyo, Mitsubishi Electric, and Sharp, will result in some stiff competition for market share at that end of the market. In manufacturing terms, NEC accounted for 51.7% of output, up 0.4 percentage points, Fujitsu made 15.5%, up 0.3 points, Toshiba had 9.4%, up 2.9 points; IBM Japan was static at 7.0% while Sharp Corp had 5.5%, and others made up 10.9%. In the digital PABX sector, the market split NEC, 35%; Fujitsu, 27%; Hitachi, 17%; Oki Electric, 12%; Nippon Telegraph, 5%; others 4%. However, 1988 is likely to see the emergence of Toshiba, which has developed a high-end PABX with over 1,000 lines ports, in conjunction with NTT. Foreigners including Northern Telecom, IBM, AT&T, Siemens are expected to more aggressive, and Mitsubishi is selling IBM products but is also developing its own PABX.
