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Mitsubishi to enter U.S. PC market

The Japanese electronics giant plans to throw its weight around the U.S. personal computer market as early as this year.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
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Mitsubishi Electric plans to enter the U.S. PC market, possibly as early as this year, making it the latest Japanese electronics giant to make a stab at the largest PC market in the world.

Mitsubishi made the comments yesterday, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's largest business daily.

Mitsubishi intends to build up its PC business on the back of its foray into the U.S. market, according to the newspaper.

Mitsubishi will sell a variety of systems including notebook PCs and server computers in the United States.

But the company is not, by any means, a shoo-in to succeed in the U.S. market. The company has always been a minor player in its home market in Japan despite being active in the Japanese PC market since the mid-1980s.

Moreover, it is one of the last major Japanese electronics manufacturers to enter the U.S. market. Toshiba stands out as the most successful Japanese PC vendor in the U.S. but this is because it entered the U.S. market in the mid-1980s and has established itself slowly but surely as the premier supplier of notebook PCs. Also, last year it entered the consumer PC market and this year it began selling business desktop PCs for the first time. Later this year, it will also market server computers.

Sony launched its PC business last year in the U.S. and is now active in the consumer PC market, though it has yet to fare very well. Hitachi also began to sell PCs in the U.S. for the first time last year and is focusing on notebook PCs. Fujitsu is is focusing on the notebook market too.

Mitsubishi must also face of crowd of the most competitive PC companies in the world : U.S. vendors.

The company is studying entry into the the U.S. consumer PC market, according to the report. This is a relatively young market, where it might have a chance to see some degree of success.

The company is now conducting market research into selling its line of Amity portable PCs in the United States, the newspaper said.

Currently, Mitsubishi sells PCs in Japan and in Europe, but has only small shares of both of those markets.

The company has set up a division to run both its PC operations and its affiliate Apricot Computers in the United Kingdom, the report said. In addition, the company has entered the German PC market.