During the early years of industrialisation microelectronics companies were essentially units in existing large companies. These companies were structured in a vertical sense: the company would produce its own semi-fabricated articles to fabricate its end products. Also the young microelectronics divisions were structured in this way. However in the mid-80's several start-up companies showed that concentration on particular segment ccould be more beneficial, this caused a major reordering of the old picture. Now companies no longer try to cover the path from raw materials to consumer goods, the new direction is to specialise on a particular step in that process and dominate the market as one of the few players in that specific field. Figure 1 shows this remarkable change of industry orientation ref. [1].
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