ABSTRACT
Competition strategy is the strategy to increase or maintain the share of market, whether it is the share of old products or new ones. Successful Japanese companies that are competitive in world markets are found in industries such as shipbuilding, camera, watch, motor-cycle and motor-vehicle manufacturing, and steel-making. In order to understand the factors behind some of Japanese companies' successful competition in the world market, one analyses the competitive strategy of successful Japanese companies. The production systems of successful Japanese companies carry very few unprecedented principles; the characteristics for success lie in the over-all implementation of the basic principles. The method of quality control was imported from the USA, but Japanese corporations have invented some different systems and implemented quality control more thoroughly. Marketing systems vary from industry to industry, and one concentrates the analysis on consumer durable goods, where 'monopolistic competition' and 'oligopoly with product differentiation' are the dominant competitive structures.
