The Land of Opportunity is...Japan!

Not India. Not China. No billion+ market there, because they're either busy ripping off American software, or else writing their own.

But Japan.

Japan is the focus, precisely because big CAD companies have difficulty penetrating the market and the culture. You hear it in the quarterly conference calls: Sales flat or falling. Management shuffled. Again. Sales approaches reworked.

As a Japanese reader of upFront.eZine told me recently, he is thankful that the autodesk-ugs-dassalt-ptc's of the world are having difficulty in his country, because otherwise his construction software firm wouldn't stand a chance.

And so it is that smaller vendors sense an opportunity, and also concentrate their efforts on Japan. Brand-new CAD vendor FreeSpace premiered its software last week in English -- and Japanese. This week, IronCAD updated release 9 in Japanese, noting that "IronCAD's existing functionality has been enhanced to match the needs of a growing Japanese user base..." And don't forget that Kubotek USA's parent company is Japanese.

The Land of the Rising Sun may provide a sunny future for small CAD vendors.

Comments

[Randall Newton]

Great minds think alike . Next week in CADCAMNet I will have an interview with the director of PTC Japan. Same issues, same questions. I even start the article by pointing out all the wailing and moaning in quarterly conference calls from the big CAD companies.