JTEC panel report on electronic manufacturing and packaging in Japan

Global competition in the electronics industry is offering unprecedented challenges to the industrial sector. Product lifecycles are shortening, development cycle times are decreasing, profit margins are declining, and new technology is readily available to anyone who aggressively pursues it. Japan has targeted electronics as an industry vital to its industrial success, and can, to a large degree, declare victory-particularly in the high-volume, low-cost electronic assembly industry. The question that the JTEC Electronic Packaging Panel was asked to answer was, why?