Local industries are established and developed on the basis of the technologies and materials available in each region, and therefore mostly comprise medium or small size companies. Accordingly, the percentage of large companies in each local industry is extremely small. Medium and small companies are therefore the most important structural element of local industry, and serve as localized, community-base industries. In the current study, in order to clarify the issues to which this fact gives rise, the factors affecting local industry are assessed, the inherent problems of local industry are analyzed, and the field of product development in local industry is discussed. For this report, problems affecting the furniture industry were analyzed, based on the results of a questionnaire investigation of the furniture industry in the Saga Prefecture, and three representative factors, price, planning ability, and quality, of the industry were assessed by means of factor analysis. The companies studied were then classified into one of 4 types : cost-oriented, planning-oriented, comprehensively-oriented, and undecided. The results confirmed the following point : 1) The local furniture industry has not yet determined its future direction : 2) awareness of problems facing the furniture industry varies according to the size of company : and 3) different future directions were identified for each company depending on which of the 4 type it fell into.
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