The Alpha announcement in Tokyo earlier this month was one of those made by Digital Equipment Corp in 14 locations around the world, including Hong Kong and Sydney in the Pacific Rim region. A cast of executives from DEC in the US assisted Nippon DEC president Edmund Reilly and DEC Japan marketing director Norio Murakami to make the announcement, including Donald Harbert, vice-president for OpenVMS Engineering and Don Jenkins, director of the Electronics Business for DEC. Regarding sales targets in Japan, for the seven models in the Model 400 series of the Alphas announced, shipments of 12,000 units through to the end of the June 1994 are targeted and of the Model 300, in excess of 6,000 units. In Japan, DEC has a applications conversion centre in Yokohama, with around 100 Japan-specific applications (of the 2,000 total worldwide) currently being ported. Most of these are engineering applications, although DEC had a significant push into the financial market in Japan which has been affected by the current economic slump and stockmarket depression. Japan and Canada are the most significant rest-of-the-world markets for DEC, making up around half of the sales in the General International Area (the rest of the world excluding the US and Europe). In Asia, DEC has manufacturing facilities in Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand and has recently established a subsidiary in South Korea where sales have hitherto been handled by a distributor.
