Miscellaneous News

T

TPenglake

Junior Member
Registered Member
Eventine said:
For a more honest and sober take, South Korea still offers stiff competition to China in the short term, especially now that they've got the US (and any country that follows the US) market mostly to themselves. Different from Japan, their industrial competitiveness has not yet fallen off a cliff and they are still fast followers in almost every industry (contrary to Japan that is basically stuck in the early 2000s).

Consider smart phones, TVs, ship building - Korea is still holding onto market share outside of China, and in ship building due to Trump's imposed fees, they've even pulled ahead of China in new orders this month.

It is not a consistent, systemic collapse like most of Japan's industries. And this is also shown in entertainment industries, where Korea continues to be strong competition in things like dramas, movies, video games, etc. In short, their national vitality has not yet been spent and Koreans are harder workers than both Japanese and Europeans. Yes, it's down hill from here, but their collapse will come mainly from demographics in the next 10-20 years, not immediately.
Click to expand...
All good points, especially as someone with limited knowledge the area, it was good reading this and all the responses.

I do wonder though, with respect to ship building, how the fact industry backlash leading to Trump slightly backpeddling on Chinese vessel fees will play into it.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
 
FriedRiceNSpice

FriedRiceNSpice

Captain
FairAndUnbiased said:
IMO they are stuck in the same sectors the same way Japan is, they just got further before stagnating. They have no presence in software at all, low presence in semiconductor equipment and machine tools and can't even make bought Russian rockets work consistently. At least Japan has its own rockets, machine tools and semiconductor equipment.

The fundamental problem is that like Japan, their standards, upstream industries and markets are all controlled by the west, and this is allowed to happen because they are themselves mentally and politically subservient to the west. They aren't allowed to innovate in new directions that the west hasn't thought of yet because the idea that they can do so would shatter their worldview.

Koreans are hard workers but working hard alone isn't what got China to where it is today, it is working creatively. Deep Seek didn't brute force more GPUs after all.
Click to expand...
Japan had 3 times the population and a 20 year head start. Korea was and always will be be constrained by its size. Korea will never have a sufficiently large domestic market or talent pool to achieve the economies of scale that larger countries can: hence self sufficiency and internationally competetive software companies will always be out of its reach. Compared to Japan, Korea punched far above its weight class.

Korean domestic software ecosystem is more complete and advanced than that of the larger European nations, and arguably better than Japan's as well. Samsung, although not primarily a software company, does have a large offering of good software products as well. Unlike the Japanese, whom exhibit an unexplainable lack of aptitude for software, Korean software engineers are very good. High value software giants only exist in two countries in the world, so it's a bit unrealistic to expect Korea to have its own software giants. Economies of scale is king in software, and the US is never going to allow any country in the core US led economic and financial bloc to compete in software. If any country attempted to do so, it'd be instantly Plaza Accorded.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top