It was a Japanese-American marriage, but its happiness depended in large part on how the couple would get along in China.

When Hitachi and IBM merged their disk drive businesses three years ago in a $2bn deal, China accounted for only about 10 per cent of the units’ combined shipments. Today the merged entity, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, ships 35 per cent of its output to China-based customers – most of them computer or consumer goods exporters – and expects that figure to grow to 50 per cent by 2007. The company has simply followed its industry in an era in which 95 per cent of the world’s notebook computers are manufactured in China.