BACKGROUND
Who does not know Toshiba? One of the biggest electronic company in the world. Toshiba was formed in 1939 by a merger of two highly innovative Japanese companies: Shibaura Seisakusho Works, which manufactured transformers, electrical motors, hydroelectric generators, and X-ray tubes; and Tokyo Electric Company, which produced light bulbs, radio receivers, and cathode ray tubes. The first company in Japan to make fluorescent lamps (1940), radar (1942), broadcasting equipment (1952), and digital computers (1954), Toshiba became the first in the world to produce the powerful one-megabit DRAM2 chip in 1985. The first laptop computer, the T3100, was also unveiled by Toshiba, in 1985.3 In 1995, Toshiba was an electronics giant, third in Japan behind Hitachi and Matsushita,4 posting sales of $47.9 billion and a net profit of $447 million. The information and communication systems and electronic devices division, which included notebook PCs, accounted for 52% of the company’s total sales. By 1995, Toshiba had produced more than 5 million portable PCs since it introduced the first laptop a decade earlier. The market for portable PCs was one of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding segments of the computer industry, as increasingly mobile professionals demanded powerful, light-weight machines packed with features. In total, 2.85 million notebook computers were sold in the U.S. in 1994, and sales in 1995 were projected to exceed 3.6 million units. In the first quarter of 1995, Toshiba was the leader in the lucrative US portable computer market, with a 19%.
Toshiba’s Ome Works, located 50 kilometers west of Tokyo in the city of Ome, began operation in January 1968. In a building measuring 80,000 square meters (860,000 square feet), Ome produced personal computers, word processors, optical character readers (OCRs), PC boards, hard disk drives, computer and