JAPAN — The Japanese have one word for Americans who pooh-pooh the idea of viewing entertainment on palm-sized screens: Pooh-pooh.OK, that may be a compound word, but the sentiment remains: Japanese consumers increasingly are forgoing desktop and laptop PCs for much more portable connected devices. Smart phones, Web-enabled game consoles, iPods, and digital video recorders top the shopping lists of consumers in a country widely considered the most tech-savvy in the world.
Even though Japanese users aren’t exactly kicking their desktop and laptop units to the curb, they aren’t replacing them as often as they once did, partly because there are other whiz-bang electronic items they’d prefer to buy and partly because manufacturers seem to be neglecting the workhorse of the digital world in favor of newer technologies like flat-screen TVs and mobile phones.
“Consumers aren’t impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors,” Masahiro Katayama, a research group leader with market-survey firm IDC, told the Associated Press. “That’s not as exciting as a bigger TV, and in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn’t bright.”
More than 50-percent of Japanese send email and browse the internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 Ministry of Internal Affairs survey quoted in an AP report. The survey also found that 30-percent of people with email-enabled phones reported using PC-based email less, including 4-percent who said they no longer use their home computers for email at all.
PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters. It’s the first drawn-out PC decline in a key market, according to IDC, and it shows no sign of slowing. The decline composes much of the reason Tokyo-based Hitachi Ltd. pulled out of the home-computer market entirely and plans to refocus its efforts in other areas (including corporate computer sales).
Based on the shrinking Japanese market and a slower, but noticeable, downturn in U.S. sales, analysts have begun to wonder whether the PC — still a disruptive, revolutionary, gotta-have household appliance in most countries — may be on its way out worldwide.
PC makers aren’t ready to call it quits just yet, though. Although desktop and laptop computer sales in Japan fell 4.8 and 3.1-percent, respectively, in the second quarter of 2007 alone, booming demand in countries where computers are just now becoming available and affordable is expected to counter the revenue shortfall seen in older markets. In 2007, sales in developing nations are expected to rise 11-percent, to an all-time high of 286 million units. In the part of Asia that is not Japan, second-quarter 2007 PC sales jumped 21.9-percent.
Besides, manufacturers are quick to point out, PCs remain an essential cog in non-consumer end of the machine that runs international commerce: the internet.
However, even Japan’s top PC maker, NEC Corp., sees the keystrokes on the wall. Its annual PC shipments in Japan slid 6.2-percent in 2006 and 14-percent in the first quarter of 2007.
“There seems to be less and less things only a PC can do,” Hiroyuki Ishii, an NEC sales official, told the AP. “The PC’s value will fade unless the PC can offer some breakthrough functions.”
