Copacomputer

Brazil's thriving industry

The success story could have come from California's Silicon Valley. Three young, blue-jeans-clad engineers tinkered with computer ideas in a garage and eventually designed a successful desktop machine. Their company, Scopus, grew so rapidly that by 1983 it had sales of $26 million. But this is not just another California start-up-to-success story. Housed in a modest concrete building, the eight-year-old firm operates out of a rundown industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city.

Scopus is now among the country's largest makers of personal computers and a leader of its remarkable data-processing industry. Despite economic woes that range from a 230% inflation rate to an estimated $96 billion foreign debt, the Third World's highest, Brazil has managed to become a thriving computer center. More than 100 Brazilian firms turn out microprocessors, terminals, printers and related products, and account for nearly 50% of the $1.48 billion worth of data-processing equipment that was sold domestically last year. As recently as 1976, not a single locally made computer was on the Brazilian market.

The home-grown industry was spawned by a handful of graduate students and engineering professors, many of whom had studied at leading U.S. universities. Having witnessed the American boom in personal computers, they seized the opportunity to build and sell similar machines in Brazil.

The fledgling designers got a big boost from the government's willingness to bar foreign firms from producing or selling microcomputers and minicomputers in Brazil. Without such a policy, the engineers argued, the domestic computer makers would have no chance to grow. Says Scopus President Edson Fregni, 36: "If you are an ant living next to an elephant, there is always the chance that he might step on you."

Such arguments were persuasive to Brazil's military government. "Everyone began to realize that in the future there would be those countries that were information producers and those that were just consumers," says Colonel Joubert de Oliveira Brizida, director of the Brazilian agency that sets data-processing policy. "We knew we couldn't become a full-fledged member of the international computer club overnight, but we didn't want to be left behind completely."

While they have nurtured domestic manufacturers, the government policies have also helped to jack up the price of Brazilian computers by limiting competition and access to foreign know-how. "By and large, Brazilian micro-and minicomputers are comparable to other machines on the international market," notes Helio

Azevedo, president of SUCESU, a nationwide society of computer users. "The problem," he adds, "is that the prices are too high." For example, the latest Scopus machine sells for $6,000, while a comparably equipped IBM Personal Computer costs $4,500.

The Brazilian market consists mostly of banks and manufacturers. In a nation in which wages average $160 a month, few families can afford computers. But the machines are popping up in some unfamiliar places. They help shrimp farmers determine how much feed to use, and the government has begun installing them in the offices of the country's 69 federal Senators. The legislators will use the computers to keep track of everything from the size of last year's soybean crop to the names of the children of their most influential constituents.