It should not be overlooked that the halt in the price decline of digital appliances is attributable to the fact that prices of these products had become more susceptible to the effects of the yen’s depreciation with the increased import penetration ratio. A decline in competitiveness and pricing power in the industry in Japan can be pointed out as a reason behind such susceptibility.
However, the CPI for digital appliances became more or less flat on a year-on-year basis in the March-April period of 2014 excluding the effects of the consumption tax hike as the yen’s depreciation paused, and the core-core CPI for the Kuarea of Tokyo in May declined by 0.2 percentage point from the previous month on the same basis.