Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Why Japan's Semiconductor Industry Failed" video.

  1. What a dissertation. There is more about the (partial) decline of Japanese electronics corporations than the US government punishing Toshiba, surely. Japan is still a global electronics giant. It is just not as colossal as it once was in the past and there are reasons for this: Firstly labour costs. While Japan is similar to Taiwan now in labour costs, assembling electronics (without robots) is fairly labour intensive, hence rely on paying workers. This is why Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) moved into China in the first place. Foxconn only assembles electronics. To a degree, this also happened with Japanese companies like NEC and Panasonic. Everyone is leaving China now, not just because of unfriendly totalitarian policies, but rising cost of workers wages in China in comparison to Vietnam and India. Secondly keeping abreast of the game. Electronics is a technological fast moving feast (i.e. rapidly changing). Take your eyes off the ball for only half a decade and someone else has moved past you. R & D is expensive and usually takes at least 10 years to take off commercially. You have to be persistent and clever with R & D to muscle in to the market. And the Chinese steal a lot. Thirdly, innovation. Japanese corporations were innovative from the late 1950s through to the 1980s, but dropped the ball after that. Japan missed out on the software evolution (Microsoft and Google for example) and has further missed out on the smart phone innovations, which were captured by the Americans (Apple) and the South Koreans (Samsung).
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  2. Japan is still a major player in the electronics industry. In particularly with optical systems, such as cameras in smart phone. The famous Sony corporation has moved into this niche area. Japanese cameras are still no. 1. Most cameras now are electonic-optical devices.
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  3. TR-55 radio is collectable now. Anyone has a good working one now is worth thousands of dollars.
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