The Japanese market for semiconductors shifted to sharp negative growth in 1998, contracting by 11.4% from the previous year to total 3,654.97B yen. The contraction was greater still on a dollar-denominated basis, at $27,921.8 M, a drop of 18.1% from 1997. The most prominent cause of this downturn was the serious state of the Japanese economy, which led both to declines in domestic production of electronic goods and to reductions in average unit prices for electronic devices.