The pretax costs of producing cold-rolled sheet steel in the United States in March of this year was $507 a metric ton--$30 a ton less than in Japan, according to Paine Webber Inc.
The dollar's decline provided U.S. firms with a strong competitive advantage. Beginning early in 1985 and accelerated by the "Plaza" agreement among the five major industrial nations, the currency shift cut the value of the dollar against the yen in half.
Another positive note is the ability of a number of U.S. industries to arrest or reverse declines in their shares of worldwide markets for their products, according to government and industry analysts.
For example, the U.S. steel industry, which lost billions of dollars in the early 1980s, returned to profitability in 1987. Last year, mills in the United States produced an estimated 11.5% of the world's steel, up from 10.3% in 1986, the low point.
Caterpillar Inc. of Peoria, Ill., is a giant in this field. The company lost $1 billion in the early 1980s as it faced relentless worldwide competition from Japan's Komatsu Ltd.
Caterpillar closed nine plants, cut salaries, turned to outside suppliers for parts it once made itself and doubled the size of its product line. In 1987, it embarked on a six-year, $1.4-billion plan to modernize its factories. Though its sales have grown 33% since 1980, Caterpillar employs 30,000 fewer workers today.
Still the world's leading maker of construction machinery, the firm has regained 8 percentage points of market share in North America in the past two years, according to one analysis.
Perhaps most unexpected, the U.S. shifted from a deficit to a surplus in the trade of semiconductors, the tiny circuits at the heart of all electronic equipment.
Still outdistanced in the $58-billion worldwide market by Japanese firms, U.S. chip makers eked out a 1.6 percentage-point gain in global market share last year, their first improvement in a decade. U.S. computer companies, while losing some ground overall in recent years, remain unrivaled in two important parts of the business--supercomputers and workstations, the fast desktop computers favored by scientists.
