11/82 COMPUTERS - SUPERCOMPUTERS - DEVELOPMENT BANK TO PROVIDE 50% OF FINANCING AT LOW INTEREST RATES FOR 5TH GENERATION OF COMPUTERS?

MITI has firmed up its plans on "new Computer Manufacturing Promotion Financing" for subsidizing new expenditures for manufacturing equipment for Japanese computer makers for the 4th generation of computers. The Development bank of Japan would provide 50% of all funds for manufacturing and inspection equipment for new memory and logic elements for the 4th generation of computers at interest rates of 7.3%. Based on this the government will be subsidizing the development of the 4th and 5th generation of computers. Up to now, the Development Bank has provided 40% of financing for the third and third and half generation of computers using 4K or 16K chips with under 500 gates for logic elements. Now MITI wants to provide a "new improved" financing system. MITI wants to provide to Japanese computer makers this new financing to produce and inspect general purpose computers using chips with a memory of 64K or more and logic elements with 1000 gates or more. The Ministry feels that for Japanese computer makers to survive in the 4th and 5th generation of computers, they need massive amounts of funds to invest in equipment. The ministry feels that now as computer life cycles have shortened from 5 to 2 or 3 years, the Japanese computer makers will need massive amounts of funds to survive the competition with IBM as they are weak in funding and technology compared to IBM. The Ministry thus feels that it is an important national policy to support the industry's international competitiveness in the next generations of computers. This was around the same time that cnmputer experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alomos National Laboratory declared that Japan may be ahead of the US in supercomputers

THE JAPAN LAWLETTER, November, 1982. By Roderick Seeman