Korea: Number One!
Clyde Prestowitz
The South Koreans have long been confident that anything the Japanese can do, they can do better, but now they’re proving it. In the 1970s-80s, the likes of Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba, Hitache, NEC, and Fujitsu killed off RCA, Motorola, and the rest of the American consumer electronics industry and came close to killing off Intel and closing down the U.S. semiconductor industry from which Silicon Valley takes its name. Yet, today, it’s the Japanese who are on the ropes as the likes of Samsung, LG, and Hynix have seized the high ground. Whereas Sony used to be the king of TV, now it’s Samsung. Developed initially in the United States in response to military needs, the market for flat panel electronic displays was quickly taken over by the Japanese who out-invested the American producers and whose dominance of television and then of VCR production gave them an in-house source of demand for mass production and its related economies of scale. … Read More>>
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