Sunset for Japanese chip makers?
“TOKYO - Japan has decided to levy punitive import tariffs on computer memory chips made by South Korea’s Hynix Semiconductors Inc, providing the latest - and most symbolic - illustration of how life is getting difficult for once-dominant Japanese chips.
Acting on cries for help from domestic companies struggling with increasingly tough foreign competition, Japan has decided to slap countervailing tariffs of 27.2% on Hynix’s dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips… to become effective on Friday and remain in place for five years…
Japanese semiconductors once dominated the world market, grabbing a combined global market share of more than 50% in the second half of the 1980s… But today, their global market share has plunged to about 20%…”
