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Japan and other nations try to match U.S. on Internet business
Copyright ) 1997 Nando.net
Copyright ) 1997 The Christian Science Monitor
TOKYO (December 27, 1997 11:18 a.m. EST http://www.nando.net) -- Reiko
Chiba led the glamorous life of a Japanese TV idol but by age 20, she
gave it all up to do something more meaningful. "What I was looking for
was something to do for the rest of my life," Chiba says. What she found
was the Internet.
Now she is one of Japan's youngest - and one of its few female -
entrepreneurs online.
Her company, Cherry Babe, provides Internet and intranet consulting in
Tokyo and also designs and hosts company Web sites. It is a small but
significant sign of how nations other than the United States are poised
to close the Internet gap between them and the country that created it.
Almost anywhere one looks, foreign entrepreneurs are getting online to
do business.
Although the U.S. dominates the world of electronic commerce, its lead
will almost certainly shrink as Internet competition heats up. Nowhere
is this more evident than in Asia.
Survey of executives
When International Data Corporation (IDC) surveyed 11,000
information-technology executives worldwide, it found 52 percent of the
executives in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) thought an
Internet strategy was important or very important. Japanese executives
were on par with Americans at 30 percent, while Western Europeans
trailed at 16 percent.
Less-developed nations are particularly interested in getting online.
Compared with building a factory or a global network of distributors,
developing an Internet presence is a cheap way to gain access to the
world's consumers.
"We call it the leapfrog effect," says Michael Sullivan-Trainor,
director of Internet research at IDC's headquarters in Framingham, Mass.
"While the US is definitely in the lead in Internet and intranet
development ... a lot of the countries in the Asia-Pacific region show
much more aggressiveness in Internet deployment."
Executives at Japan's computer companies make no bones about where
they're headed. "Internet business in Japan will definitely catch up
with what's going on in America," says Tadayasu Sugita, head of personal
systems business group at Fujitsu Ltd.
Rise in number of users
The change will come slowly. Between 1997 and 2001, according to the
IDC, the number of users of the Internet's World Wide Web will increase
sixfold in the US to 180 million, fourfold in Western Europe to 43
million, and nearly six times in the Asia-Pacific region (including
Japan) to 49 million.
Japan has special challenges to overcome. For one thing, just as its
personal-computer (PC) boom has faded this year, so has its Internet
enthusiasm. "There was an Internet boom in the past, but it has been
very difficult to maintain," says Kousuke Aoki, director of the
Multimedia Research Institute in Tokyo.
Another challenge is telephone charges. The prices of calls are seven to
eight times more than those typically found in the US.
Then there's the Japanese language. With so much of the Internet based
on English, those who can't read it have access to far less information.
Still, a surprising number of Japanese brave these challenges to get
online. One of the largest Internet providers in Japan, Big Globe, had
2.4 million users at the end of September and is adding 30,000 new users
a month. Most users of the service, which is part of computer giant NEC,
are buyers of NEC computers. Nearly 8 million Japanese are estimated to
be using either an online service or receiving direct Internet access.
Profits not coming yet
Many of them are going into business. Some 2,000 companies in Japan
alone provide access to the Internet. "There are millions of those
Internet entrepreneurs," says Chiba of Cherry Babe. But "it's not very
profitable. They have to have some kind of safety net."
Millions of digital pioneers on this side of the Pacific haven't made
any profits either. Not wanting to limit herself to a single field,
Chiba is developing game software and also does promotion and event
planning for Japanese music and film personalities. And she's also
interested in getting more women involved in the Internet.
"The PC ... is something that men do, and I want to break that
stereotype," she says.
By LAURENT BELSIE, The Christian Science Monitor
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