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> Enforcing home grown products to average customers, subsidizing one specific firm to take all domestic market share is how Samsung and Hyundai made its way to

• yorwba 7y ago
  It's hard to get to the point where your products are significantly superior if you have no revenue while you experiment with improvements to your product until it can compete on its own. Funding doesn't guarantee success, but without it you may have no chance at all.
• hkmurakami 7y ago
  It basically gives domestic firms breathing room to survive and grow, versus being suffocated by the currently superior products or foreign firms. The hope then is that in the future, with a stronger financial footing, these firms' products will improve to be truly competitive with those of the global competitors. At least in hardware/manufacturing, both South Korea and China have done this with great success thus far.
  • honestoHeminway 7y ago
    Europe, all in market-liberal spirits, has not done this. And it shows.
  • Jedd 7y ago
    > It basically gives domestic firms breathing room to survive and grow, versus being suffocated by the currently superior products or foreign firms. Yes, I get that. It's basic tariff protectionism. Many countries have done, and continue to, do this. Here in Australia we've done it for decades, but with no global success. > The hope then is that in the future ... I hope that isn't the official strategy. ; | The stronger financial footing (also achievable via vanilla domestic success sans tarrifs) doesn't necessarily guarantee global success, especially if other nation states are adopting similar fiscal & trade policies ... which it's fair to say they are.
    • stirlo 7y ago
      > Here in Australia we've done it for decades, but with no global success. Examples? We have some of the most open markets in the world. We’re one of the only countries the US has a trade surplus with...
      • qilo 7y ago
        I guess the parent poster meant that despite doing the same in Australia, this didn't produce global companies like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, etc.
        • erklik 7y ago
          and I think that's the question, which companies did Australia do that with? I can't ocme up with any.
          • roenxi 7y ago
            Australia has a smaller population, very high wages and a technology-phobic government with policies that have filtered all investment into the property market for decades - rather than letting investment go into high-risk-high-reward projects. Not much to report on the megacorp front. There are major Australian companies out there; the Atlassians, BHPs and CSL's of the world. They aren't Samsung by any stretch.
            • rswail 7y ago
              Australia has second rate government and second rate management. We're good at digging up dirt and shipping it, or ploughing dirt and shipping it in the form of food. Our management and government are incredibly risk-averse and we follow trends and popular management theories instead of creating them.
              • improbable22 7y ago
                No insight into Australian management, but having lots of valuable dirt to dig up does make it much harder to get going in other lines of business. I think this is called "dutch disease" by economists: the high wages paid by the dirt-digging (early on) mean that you can't simultaneously be competitive in metal-bashing, which makes it hard to develop other industries.
• improbable22 7y ago
  A key idea here is that, to keep this support, the firms were also obliged to export. Even small numbers, at a loss, at first, but they had to have paying customers in America. Firms that couldn't do this were allowed to go bankrupt / get swallowed up. At least in Korea. In less successful countries, domestic top dogs were simply protected, and were quite happy to keep making cars from the '50s. An excellent book on this story is "How Asia Works" by Joe Studwell. (On which I'd be interested to hear any opinions from actual Koreans.)
  • Jedd 7y ago
    That 'force overseas sales' thing sounds like a notable differentiator, though I'm not well versed enough to know if there's (m)any contra examples for this practice. And thank you - I've added How Asia Works to my reading stack.