The earthquake offshore of Japan should have little impact on the wireless communications industry because, unlike in semiconductors and panels, Japan-based companies do not play a major role in this market.
From a wide area network (WAN) stand point, though Japan's telecom service has the highest market penetration in the world, shipments of telecom equipment is still far behind the big three of Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens Networks and Huawei.
As for wireless local area network (WLAN), the wireless chip sector is dominated by US companies such as Broadcom and Qualcomm. The two companies combine for more than 60% of the global Wi-Fi chip shipments. Their Japanese counterparts consist of a much smaller share.
