Brazil's Market Reserve
Why a Brazilian computer cost more, and why that was the point
Brazil protected its domestic computer industry by restricting imports, so machines were built at home from local parts and cost more than the imported equivalents. A 1981 interview with a Brazilian manufacturer's commercial director sets out the reasoning in the industry's own words, down to a decision not to fit a thermal printer because the paper would have to be imported.
Brazil’s home-computer market did not run on imports. It ran on machines built in Brazil, under a policy of reserva de mercado — a market reserved for domestic manufacturers — and this changed what the machines were, not only who sold them.
The clearest statement of it in this library is not a policy document. It is an interview with a manufacturer’s commercial director, Oscar Alegre of DISMAC, in the first issue of Micro Sistemas in October 1981.
The reasoning, in the industry’s own words
Asked whether the government would keep the market reserve, he does not defend it on grounds of national pride:
“O Brasil não tem outra opção. O Brasil não tem petróleo e possui uma dívida muito elevada, cujo serviço é pesado.”
Brazil has no other option; Brazil has no oil and carries a very high debt whose servicing is heavy. The policy is presented as a balance-of-payments measure — every imported component is foreign currency leaving a country that cannot spare it.
The interview’s pull-quote puts the same argument in a domestic image:
“É preferível comer em um prato de lata de fabricação nacional do que ficar devendo um prato de porcelana inglesa. Quanto mais se deve, mais dependente se é.”
Better to eat off a domestically made tin plate than to be in debt for an English porcelain one. The more you owe, the more dependent you are.
What it cost, stated plainly
He does not claim the machines were better, or even as cheap:
“Sabemos que um gravador importado custa menos que o que tem nosso aparelho. Mas com esses componentes não gastamos fora, não nos endividamos mais. O diferencial de custo é um preço a pagar pelo desenvolvimento.”
We know an imported cassette recorder costs less than the one in our machine. But with these components we spend nothing abroad and take on no more debt. The cost difference is a price to be paid for development.
Argentina is named as the counter-example: there the policy of importing manufactured goods was adopted, “e os resultados foram desastrosos para o país”.
It reached down into the hardware
The detail worth keeping is a design decision. Asked about adding a printer to the D-8000, he says they would not fit a thermal one —
“para não depender de papel importado”
— so as not to depend on imported paper.
A machine’s peripheral specification, decided by the balance of payments. This is the kind of thing that makes a machine unintelligible to anyone reading its specification alone: a thermal printer was the cheap, obvious choice everywhere else, and here it was ruled out by the consumable it needed.
The same interview names the market’s other consequence — you could not simply buy a peripheral. In the United States, he says, you buy a micro and then go to any shop for peripherals; in Brazil “por enquanto o problema dos periféricos é grave”, and DISMAC would have to build its own memory expansion because nobody else would until enough machines existed to make it worth doing.
On copying
The interview is equally direct about where the designs came from:
“O Brasil ainda copia. Mas se a roda está inventada, para que inventá-la de novo? … Não vale a pena investir no desenvolvimento de um hardware original ou na criação de uma linguagem brasileira. Pesquisa quem pode, e não quem quer.”
Brazil still copies; if the wheel is invented, why invent it again — research is done by those who can, not those who would like to. Asked whether Brazil should copy Japanese machines instead of American ones, he answers that Japan’s virtue is copying American secrets at half the cost, but that the ideas are American.
⚠ This is one executive’s account, in one interview, in 1981. It is a first-hand statement of the reasoning by someone inside the industry the policy protected, which makes it good evidence of how the policy was argued for and poor evidence of whether the argument was right. This library holds no Brazilian economic source, no government document, and no critic of the reserve. Its later effects — on prices, on the machines available, on when the policy ended — are not documented here and are not claimed.
See also
- Micro Sistemas — where the interview appears
- DISMAC — the manufacturer
- Commodore — whose Toronto assembly plant existed to get around a different trade barrier