The Washington-based Software Publishers Association has revealed the results of its first study of the sales of personal computer software by US companies in the Japanese market. Of the US industry’s major firms, 22 reported aggregate sales of $116m for the first nine months of 1991, an increase of 45% over the level in 1990. Since Japanese firms did not participate in the study, the Association says it is unable to estimate the full size of the Japanese applications software market. Among the more interesting findings is that US firms’ sales in the Japanese market are still heavily MS-DOS-based, and for the first three quarters of the year, MS-DOS sales accounted for 85% of total sales with Windows and Macintosh applications comprising most of the balance. By comparison, in Europe, MS-DOS applications account for only 54% of the total market. Among software categories, spreadsheets are by far the largest, with 58% of the applications sales of the sample. Languages and programming tools are another 17% of the market, and relational databases comprise another 11%. Word processors from American firms are, not surprisingly, less well represented in Japan than in other regions. The size of the Japanese market places it among the major markets in the world, and similar studies of the software markets of Western Europe indicate that the Japanese market is now among the largest markets for US firms. For the same first three quarters of the year, a similar group of companies reported sales of $265m in Germany and Austria, $205m in the UK and Ireland with $191m in France.
