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Not Found in Japan: UPS

During my visit in Japan, I have found a lot of interesting stuff. Some of these this I have already posted to this forum; others I will post in the future. But today, I want to talk about a particular experience where I could not find an item in Japan. That item is quite popular and wide-spread in the United States. It is called an uninterruptable power supply (UPS).

An UPS is basically a battery-backed powerstrip, where you can plug your computer into, to prevent data-loss from power-outage. In the United States, you can walk into most electronics retailers and pick one up for less than $50.

So when I visited my mom in Japan, I wanted to make sure she doesn't lose any data on her computer during a power outage. I went to all of the electronic retailers in Osaka, Japan, but could not find an UPS on the shelf. Finally, I asked one of the friendly sales person to help direct me to a consumer-grade UPS. After a bit of communication and head-scratching, he finally figured out what I wanted. He said he didn't have any in stock and will need to special order one for us. When he tried to do that, he realized such a product doesn't even exist in the market in Japan. For example, we went to the APC (one of the largest UPS manufacturer) site in Japan and found that they only had industry-grade UPS that are sold to large corporations and company. Consumer-grade UPS simply aren't sold in Japan.

It's quite profound for a country to be missing an entire market segment. I thought that was particular interesting. Does Japan not suffer power-outages?

Chieh Cheng
Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:34:15 +0000

Very interesting!!! I stumbled upon your post while looking for a Japanese manufacturer of UPS units to distribute in my country.
it seems this is not good news!!!

Bashar Salah
Sat, 12 May 2012 07:34:29 +0000

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