Abstract
In current society, new electronic equipment is developed and used according to the needs of consumers. As time passes, the products become obsolete as the result of competitive product development, and they are replaced by products with more or improved functions and offered at a cheaper price. The product life cycle is referred to as “PLC” and it consists of four stages: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. In the decline stage of the PLC, the manufacturer has to analyze the market behavior, and judge how long the current product will be sold and when the next-generation product will be introduced. This paper proposes a new model and methods to analyze the decline stage. On the background of the decline behavior in the PLC for electronic equipment, technological progress enables various functions to be incorporated into a single product according to a consumer's need. This paper focuses on the shift from single-function products to multifunction products, and analyzes the phenomena using a regression analysis for current products and determining the number of newly developed products to produce.
