Web pages of small and medium sized manufacturing companies in Tokyo and their global business needs

Due to the rapid globalization of the manufacturing industries, the importance of an international company webpage has been increasing for Small and Medium sized Manufacturing companies (SMEs) in Japan. The author conducted a survey on the corporate web pages of SMEs in Ota City, Tokyo to see if the percentage of SMEs having their web pages in foreign languages has changed since 2007. The percentage of SMEs having a foreign language web page was larger in 2010 than the percentage found by a similar survey in 2007, and the number of web pages in English or Chinese had also increased. A result of this study shows that five percent of the SMEs which had their corporate websites only in Japanese in 2007 were put out of business or merged with other corporations, while none of the SMEs having a corporate web page in a foreign language did.