The Brazilian electronics industry operates within a policy regime which has promoted excessive diversification rather than concentrating on developing strong technological capabilities in appropriate areas. The international competitiveness of most segments of the electronics industry declined sharply during the first half of the 1980s.

Four major sectors of the electronics industry are examined here: microelectronics, banking automation, colour TVs, and public digital exchanges. In microelectronics, the focus of specialisation should be on the design of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). To support those design efforts with an efficient local IC fabrication capacity, the government needs to forge a cooperative arrangement among producers to enable the establishment of a silicon foundry of efficient scale. In banking automation, which is highly software and engineering intensive, firms could be expected to diversify into point-of-sale automation, without giving ...