Asia Seen Taking a Bigger Share of High-Tech Market

The U.S. and European high-technology industries will lose global market share to Asian manufacturers in the 1990s, the technology research firm Dataquest said Tuesday.

“The rapid growth of Japan and the rest of Asia has not only enlarged the world’s market for technology-related products, but, as a consequence, has reduced American and European shares of that market,” said Manny Fernandez, Dataquest’s president and chief executive.

America’s high-tech competitiveness is deteriorating in particular, Fernandez said at a presentation of Dataquest’s five-year high technology forecast.

“Based upon market share trends in electronic equipment, semiconductors and semiconductor materials, the U.S. high-tech industry is obviously in a state of decline,” he said.

By 1993, the Asian semiconductor market will approach $16 billion, making it almost as large as Western Europe’s, Fernandez said.

Dataquest expects worldwide semiconductor consumption to grow 15.3% this year, with the North American market growing 14.6%. Most of this growth will come from memory chips, rather than logic chips.