We were not shown any examples of this during our visit, but were assured that the process is in use within the plant. Osasa is in charge of planning information systems for Nippon Steel, and is not involved in steel making. We had several hours of interesting discussions about two of Nippon's computer activities. Osasa explained that Nippon is an OEM supplier of various Sun workstations. I wondered why there should be yet another nameplate for sale here, but he assured me that they were hoping to compete on price and also to develop a number of specialized Japanese software products.
Some justification is described below.
I really couldn't understand why they would want to inject another clone into this market. He agreed that it was very unlikely they would succeed, but given that the market was so huge such a high risk venture was worth trying. Even though they are still far less common here than in the West, sales figures are still impressive. Estimates for unit sales in Japan are as follows. For comparison, IBM and Fujitsu, each have an installed base of around 5,000 mainframes in Japan.