Some Lessons of Japanese Economy

After World War II, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, India and other countries enjoyed the industrial transfer and technology spillover of the United States. Among them, some countries have quickly caught up with American technology. However, most countries lose their motivation and slow technological innovation after their economic growth to a certain extent, thus being distanced by the United States again.

Today, only Japan and South Korea have successfully followed the United States, and the technical strength of some industries in Japan has surpassed that of the United States. After experiencing the bubble economic crisis, Japan is still a technological power second only to the United States.

Therefore, the development path of Japan's economy has certain reference significance for us: the transformation and upgrading of Japan's economic structure is a classic road under the open economy. At that time, Japanese companies mainly took two paths:

The first is upstream.

The second is to go global.

The difficulty of Japan's transformation at that time was the double blow of Japan-US trade friction and bubble economy. In the 1970s and 1980s, driven by the oil crisis and the US-Japan trade war, Japan successfully shifted from heavy industries such as coal, steel, petrochemical and shipbuilding to industries such as automobiles, semiconductors, general machinery, household appliances and electronics.

Japan's bubble economy is caused by its improper monetary policy on the road of active globalization. After the bubble crisis broke out, Japanese companies were once in a dilemma and hesitant.

After the outbreak of the Asian financial turmoil, Japanese companies broke their arms to survive, decisively abandoned their terminal business, and transformed and upgraded to the upstream core technologies and commercial fields.

Panasonic has expanded from home appliances to automotive electronics, residential energy, commercial solutions and other fields; Sharp turned to medical care, robotics, smart home, automobiles, air safety and other technical fields; Toshiba entered the business field of large-scale nuclear power, new energy and hydrogen fuel cell power stations.

Hitachi transformed into the commercial field earlier, and now the performance of smart grid, elevators and other basic equipment is growing steadily. At the same time, Hitachi has a high level of nuclear power technology. Mitsubishi is committed to hydrogen fuel cells, and Toyota's hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are gradually commercialized.

Nowadays, Japanese enterprises bid farewell to the terminal home appliances and electronics market, and establish global competitive advantages in large-scale nuclear power, new energy, hydrogen fuel cells, power grids, medical technology, energy storage technology, biotechnology, robot research and development, and high-tech and soft aspects in commercial fields.

The core technology in the upstream field of industry is the heavy weapon of the country. Nuclear power, chips, precision manufacturing, biotechnology, hydrogen fuel, new energy, robots, etc. are the key to an industrial technology and the lifeblood of a country.

At that time, Matsushita CEO Tsuga Hiroshi said after seeing Sony's CES booth: "Now anyone can make TV, but this will happen to smartphones. Not just TV. "

This sentence tells the true meaning of the core technology.

When the demographic dividend disappears and the global technology dividend is exhausted, competition is forced to go upstream to the core technology, business and basic science fields, and relying on self-reliance and independent research and development becomes an inevitable trend.

Throughout the world, Siemens, Bosch, Bavaria, ThyssenKrupp, Demajisen Seiki, Continental, Schaeffler, AT & amp； T, IBM, Intel, Verizon, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Cisco, General Electric, Amazon, Google, Apple and Comcast all mastered the upstream core technologies. The difference is that powerful American companies take all the responsibility from upstream to downstream.

Many people think that Japan has "disappeared" in the last thirty years. In fact, Japan has become more powerful, and Japanese companies have mastered the core technologies of the upstream and controlled the lifeblood of the industry in a low-key manner.

In this year's trade war between Japan and South Korea, Japan showed its hidden strength of "dressing up as a pig to eat a tiger". Korea's semiconductors are very powerful, and its memory products rank first in the world, among which the market share of random access memory (DRAM) exceeds 70%. But few people know that Japan has actually strangled the lifeline of Korean semiconductors.

Japan accounts for 90% of the global total production of fluoropolyimide and photoresist, and 70% of the hydrogen fluoride of global semiconductor enterprises needs to be imported from Japan. Japan is almost the only source of core raw materials for Korean semiconductor enterprises.

Japan imposed an embargo on South Korea, and the stocks of Samsung, LG and SK were immediately in a hurry. Almost all organic light-emitting diodes, memory chips, CIS chips and DRAM in South Korea cannot be produced. Samsung is the pillar of the Korean economy, and electronics is the lifeblood of the Korean economy. Japan's move is equivalent to hitting seven inches of the Korean economy.

This is the strong dominance of Japanese high-end materials (fluorine polyimide, hydrogen fluoride, photoresist) in the upstream field.

It is worth noting that upgrading to the upstream core technology field involves basic scientific research, which Japan attaches great importance to. This year, Japanese scientist Yoshino shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with two American scientists. In this way, Japan won 19 Nobel Prizes in the past 19 years.

Wu Jun, the former vice president of Tencent, criticized Tencent for not needing B gene, which once caused controversy. Unfortunately, this controversy is not constructive. In fact, it is not that Tencent lacks the to B gene. Private enterprises in China have little incentive to invest in the field of To B.

Few private enterprises in China are involved in upstream core technologies and commercial fields such as nuclear power, chips, precision manufacturing, biotechnology, hydrogen fuel, operating system, new energy, industrial robots, etc. This is completely different from Japan and Germany. So far, private enterprises like Siemens, Bavaria and ThyssenKrupp have not appeared in China.

There are two main reasons:

First, in the past few decades, China's terminal market was large enough to belong to the Italian Jobs era.

Big capitals such as Tencent and Ali would rather invest in Meituan, Didi taxis, bicycles and Internet coffee than chips, operating systems and communication technologies. Investing in the terminal market, it is easy to obtain huge users and data, and then go public with the concepts of big data and new retail. Compared with the upstream investment, the terminal investment cycle is short and the efficiency is high.

Second, the upstream industries such as power grid, nuclear energy, petroleum and communication network are basically non-competitive industries.

The entry threshold of these industries is very high, and private enterprises simply cannot enter. Even in some open competitive industries, buyers are often state-owned enterprises and government departments, and ordinary private enterprises are afraid to enter. The only way to upgrade this technology has encountered non-competitive obstacles.

Only by opening up upstream industries and allowing more private capital to enter can China's technological transformation and upgrading be promoted, and it is possible for China enterprises to master their core competitiveness and control the high-end commercial market. Of course, this also involves institutional reform.

Japan's second road is globalization.

In the1980s, Japan's economy took off. Driven by the appreciation of the yen and the internationalization strategy, Japan has opened the door to global investment and mergers and acquisitions, and transferred a large amount of capital and large-scale manufacturing overseas. This is Japan's first global industrial transfer after the war.

However, after the bubble crisis broke out, Japan's domestic assets were severely suppressed by the squeeze bubble and deleveraging, and enterprises did not recover for a long time. Japanese enterprises have experienced ten years of struggle and hesitation, and their globalization strategy has retreated greatly.

After 2000, Japan began the second wave of globalization. This globalization has promoted the large-scale growth of Japan's overseas assets, and the total assets even exceed Japan's total GDP. 20 1 1 year, Japan's overseas assets and industries are equivalent to Japan's 1.8 times.

Today's Japan is the only deeply globalized economy in Asia and a truly globalized developed country.

Why didn't Japan's economic globalization encounter a "resource trap" like the United States, slowing down technological growth?

The main reason is that Japan suffered from the violent leverage of the bubble crisis and superimposed the trade friction between Japan and the United States. In the middle and late 1980s, Japan took advantage of the appreciation of the yen to conduct a large number of mergers and acquisitions around the world, similar to the past US dollars and pounds.

However, after the collapse of the bubble crisis, the yen suffered heavy losses, ending Japan's capital export model. After that, Japanese companies increased their technological transformation and upgrading while seeking low-cost labor investment in Asia.

In addition, under the pressure of the United States, Japanese companies are forced to go global.

Take the automobile industry as an example. From 1979, the Japanese and American governments began to negotiate on automobile trade. The United States strongly urged Japan to implement the voluntary export restraints, and Japanese automobile manufacturers invested and set up factories in the United States to open the Japanese automobile market.

Since 1982, Japanese auto companies such as Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi and Fuji Heavy Industries have successively invested in the United States under the background of Japan-US trade friction and Japan's internationalization strategy.

At the beginning, Japanese enterprises were under great pressure, their costs increased and their scale dropped sharply. Although Japanese car companies have also encountered the trade union problems encountered by Fuyao Glass, they have survived tenaciously in the United States and gradually established a competitive advantage.

Japanese cars produced in the United States soared from 654.38+60,000 in 0983, 654.38+240,000 in 0984 and 654.38+360,000 in 0985 to 654.38+740,000 in 0987, 654.38+890,000 in 0988 and 65438 in 0988.

This active or passive globalization, though difficult and even dangerous, has forced Japanese auto companies such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Fuji Heavy Industries to grow into international auto companies. The original three car companies in the United States now have only two. Toyota once surpassed GM to become the world's largest automobile company. Under the pressure of strong global competition, Toyota is forced to use the global industrial chain to build an efficient just-in-time production system.

China now faces an international background similar to that of the Japanese. However, unlike Japanese, China has a huge domestic market advantage.

So far, China's biggest advantage is not cheap labor, but market size. Because of the huge market scale, it has an excellent division of labor advantage.

In the third chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith thinks that "the division of labor is limited by the scope of the market". He believes that the division of labor is limited by the scale of market exchange. If the transaction volume is too small, it will be impossible to specialize in production and the division of labor will be limited.

Smith took transportation as an example to illustrate the problem. For example, waterway transportation has opened up a bigger market than land transportation, so that "the improvement of various industrial divisions naturally begins from the coast." This improvement often takes many years to gradually spread to the mainland. " This is Smith's theorem.

From 65438 to 0928, when Allyn Young, an American economist, became the chairman of the Economic Science and Statistics Division of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he developed Smith's theorem in his inaugural speech "Increasing Income and Economic Progress".

Yang's view is that "the division of labor depends on the market scale, the market scale depends on the division of labor, and the possibility of economic progress exists in the above conditions", which is the Smith-Yang Theorem.

China's huge market will surely promote a finer division of labor, which will further expand the market. Fine division of labor contributes to the improvement of technology.

The first practical steam train was invented by Stevenson, an Englishman, but the fastest development of railway transportation was in the United States. China's huge travel market has a strong demand for high-speed rail, which stimulates the breakthrough of high-speed rail technology. China's huge grain market stimulates Yuan Longping's breeding technology innovation.

In the future industrial intelligence field, China's biggest advantage is its huge data market. Big data is like the "energy" of artificial intelligence, which stimulates the innovation of artificial intelligence algorithms. China market can provide a large number of unmanned data, and only by accumulating a large number of test data can unmanned vehicles enter the commercial field.

On the other hand, small markets such as Singapore, China and Hongkong can only seek the global market and get more data, funds and talents from the global market. Therefore, these economies generally implement free and open economic policies.

However, this does not mean that China does not need to open its economy to the world. In the era of knowledge economy, global technical standards will become the jewel in the crown of technology. If a set of global technical standards cannot be re-formulated, it is common sense to follow international standards. Nowadays, China has accumulated some technologies in the fields of biological genes, but how to integrate with the international community is still a difficult problem.

Only by establishing open self-confidence, making good use of the domestic market, breaking down institutional barriers and helping enterprises upgrade to the upstream core technologies and commercial fields can China continue to catch up on the road of technological upgrading.