World Industry 2 (Electronics)
The electronics industry, which supports the information society, has different characteristics from the automotive industry.
As a high-tech industry, the speed of product innovation is fast, and product development capability is crucial. Furthermore, it is an industry with many participating manufacturers and intense competition.
Semiconductors
Since I could not find data on semiconductor production volume, I used the revenue of each company as a substitute.
The data is here.
The semiconductor market, which was once Japan's exclusive domain, has now been significantly outpaced by South Korea and Taiwan. The United States is firmly protecting its semiconductor industry as a national policy. China is unable to increase its production capacity due to the impact of the United States' strengthened semiconductor regulations against China.
It seems that how much long-term perspective politics can have also has an impact.
Computer Technology
Next, let's look at the revenue of computer and technology-related companies.
The data is here.
Apple accounts for 30% of the sales of US tech companies. As for South Korea's Samsung, it accounts for 70% of all of South Korea. Taiwan's Foxconn is the world's largest Electronics Manufacturing Service (EMS) company, and it performs contract manufacturing for Apple, Nintendo, and others. (Although Foxconn's headquarters is in Taiwan, its factories are in China.)
Smartphones
I will investigate which countries are active in smartphone production based on the global share by model from 2022 to 2023. The data is here. The smartphone market is seeing fierce competition for the top share between Apple of the US and Samsung of South Korea. China's Xiaomi has entered in 3rd place. Following in 4th place and below are Chinese companies such as Oppo, VIVO, and Huawei.
Although it is unrelated to Geography B, I looked into which smartphones are popular by country. The data is here.
While the iPhone 14 is mainstream globally, it is the iPhone 13 in Japan. Since both cost over 100,000 yen, perhaps people do not switch easily? Or maybe the contract period restrictions with mobile phone companies are having an effect. Also, new customers might be going for the cheaper SE model. By the way, it is said that Japanese people love iPhones, so let's see if that is actually the case.
Developed countries are generally dominated by Apple. It does not seem that Japanese people are particularly fond of Apple. In South Korea, the Galaxy series is doing well, as it is Samsung's home turf. In India and China, you can see that there is a scramble including Chinese-made smartphones.
iPhone Index?
Looking at this data, I thought of the term "iPhone Index." It is like the Big Mac Index. I wonder if there is a positive correlation between iPhone market share and GNI per capita.
When I actually calculated the correlation coefficient using SAS, there was a very strong positive correlation of 0.92.
Since iPhones are more expensive than Android smartphones, it seems they are difficult to buy unless personal income increases. They are treated as so-called luxury goods.
By the way, when I searched on Google to see if the "iPhone Index" exists in the world, there were 280,000 results for "iPhone index" and 100,000 for the Japanese "iPhone指数". It seems to be a measure of "how many days you have to work to buy an iPhone."
Summary
The electronics industry is an important industry that supports today's information society. Because it is a collection of cutting-edge technologies, intra-firm division of labor is being carried out, where research and development are conducted in developed countries, and mass production is carried out in newly industrializing countries or developing countries where wages are low because it needs to be labor-intensive. This division of labor has progressed further, and fabless companies that only conduct research and development and separate the production department have also appeared. Conversely, companies such as EMS (Electronics Manufacturing Service) and foundries that only undertake production are also increasing in newly industrializing countries.
I digressed a little bit in the smartphone section this time, but digging deeper into areas that I thought were interesting leads to new discoveries, which is the joy of data science. While conducting this research, many sites had articles written without any basis, such as "Japanese people love iPhones, but Android is mainstream overseas." My acquaintances overseas also only had iPhones, so I wondered if that was true based on my gut feeling, but when I actually looked into it, it seems that was not the case after all. I recognized the importance of data once again.