日米ITメーカーのサービス事業シフト

抄録

IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC are the major IT manufacturers that represent the IT industry in the United States and Japan. These IT manufacturers have been primarily running a product business based on providing hardware and software products.
However, these IT manufacturers are attempting to shift their business focus from products to services. They are doing this in order to respond to the diversification of IT technologies and to the loss in revenue of the hardware product business caused by commoditization. The U.S. IT manufacturers are also starting to transform their business structures to the comprehensive business model that is characteristic of the Japanese IT manufacturers. However, the comprehensive business model of the U.S. IT manufacturers and the Japanese IT manufacturers is turning out to be different.
The U.S. IT manufacturers are building a business model called a “strategic” comprehensive business model based on combining the strong products business and services business. On the other hand, the Japanese IT manufacturers had to focus on dealing with Japanese customers' expectations and solving their problems in the Japanese market. Therefore, their business model evolved into a so called “inevitable” comprehensive business model. These differences were brought about by the change in business structure from vertical integration to horizontal specialization in the IT industry during the Open System Computing era.
This change in the business structure created a gap in the competitiveness between the U.S and the Japanese IT manufacturers which also contributed to the differences in the comprehensive business models. The result of the differences between comprehensive business models led the U.S. IT manufacturers to maintain a high market share and a strong position in all categories of IT business.
In this paper, I will describe the reason for the shift to services of IT manufacturers. Then, I will analyze the differences between US and Japanese comprehensive business models. Finally, I will propose an action that Japanese IT manufacturers should consider concerning the future business model.