Intel's Chief Executive Craig Barrett says China will overtake Japan as their biggest customer in 2002 or 2003.

Such a statement would have been a surprise only a few years ago, but Japan's continuing economic slump, combined with a fast reforming, changing, and increasingly powerful China is rewriting the common view of economic orthodoxy.

US based Intel is the world's leading chip company, and gained strong brand recognition with their "Intel Inside" logo plastered over personal computers. For a product that is "hidden" within one of the world's most popular consumer and industrial products, Intel's branding was a strategic branding triumph that helped in keeping a substantial gap between Intel and their similarly technically-gifted competitors.

Japan accounted for 7 percent of Intel's last quarter sales of $6.9 billion. The rest of the Asia-Pacific region made up 35 percent.

That's a heap of product they are predicting...