Asianometry

People love their shoes and sneakers. Nike is a $250 billion company. Athletes make hundreds of millions endorsing their own athletic shoes. And vintage Jordan 1s are trading for thousands of dollars on sites like StockX. 

You also might vaguely know that the big shoe brands outsource their manufacturing to third parties. And that the shoes are made by low-wage labor overseas. "Somewhere in Asia," they usually say. 

But we don't hear all that much about the actual companies running those production lines. As it turns out, the biggest branded maker of athletic and casual footwear comes from Taiwan - making 300 million pairs each year. 

You might have heard something about Evergrande Group (恒大集團) recently. This is a sprawling company with billions of dollars in debt, a little bit of a cash crunch, and is looking for a way out. 

Who knows what is going to happen. Everything is all up in the air and we are hearing new things each day. But the whole saga has gotten me interested in how a real estate company has managed to grow so far, and so fast. That is what we will talk about today. 

In this video, we look at the rise and fall of what had once been China's biggest real estate conglomerate. A company now with $300 billion in liabilities. 

For nearly half a century, there were two Carl Zeisses. One based in the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany. The other in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. 

The Carl Zeiss of today is the Western German variant. Their work in lithography and EUV sits on the cutting edge of what is possible in nanoscale technology. But the Carl Zeiss of East Germany was fascinating too. It grew to be a massive industrial conglomerate, doing cutting edge research into optics, military tech, and semiconductors. 

In this video, I want to step away from Asia once more and look at a fascinating history. One of Germany's most iconic companies, split in two between East and West. Capitalism and Socialism. Let's go! 

In 1997, American chip consortium SEMATECH sounded an alarm to the industry about the chip design productivity gap. They observed that integrated chip manufacturing capabilities were expanding at about 40% a year. At the time. 

Yet IC design capabilities were only growing at about half of that rate. Thus, a potential crisis was brewing where design capabilities lag far behind manufacturing. 

This crisis never took place for reasons we will discuss later. In turn, however, a new challenge for the industry has emerged: Verification. 

Here, we are going to look at why this previously unheralded step has become a rather big deal in today's competitive chip design world. 

In 2016, Hanjin Shipping, Korea's biggest container shipping line, abruptly filed for reorganization. 

The company had once been the country's pride and joy - a worthy sibling alongside flagship carrier Korean Air. 

The unexpected insolvency roiled the markets and caused global chaos in the shipping industry. 

Once they had been the fourth biggest container line in the world. In 2016, they had 97 ships and called on 90 different ports in over 35 countries around the world. 

I recently got an iPhone 13 Pro. I love it. For me, the thing that sticks out most - literally - is the camera. 

For a long time, iPhones have had increasingly better cameras. The last few generations, camera performance has headlined the marketing messaging: Get the new iPhone, because the camera is a lot better. It is one of the few things that gets people to upgrade. 

And indeed, the 13 Pro's camera takes really good pictures. But it is not just the iPhone. Virtually all of today’s top smartphones can take images on par with anything you can get with a standalone. 

How does your mobile phone camera work? And how did it get to be so good? In this video we will look at the amazing computer and semiconductor engineering that goes inside this impressive feature.

In 1978, 70% of all the world's lithography equipment came from an American supplier. As late as 1982, Americans still held 62% of the market. 

Seven years later in 1989, Japanese firms held 70% share of the market - led by their two lithography giants: Canon and Nikon. The American once-market leaders, rapidly declining. One loses $100 million by 1986. The other withdraws from the market entirely by 1989. 

The dominance of the Japanese lithography industry stunned the semiconductor world. Americans back home spilled gallons of ink, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. The answer, as always, is not what you might have expected. 

In this video, a prequel to my ASML video, we are going to look at Japan’s famous cross-industry effort to develop an indigenous semiconductor industry and conquer the global lithography market on the side. 

China is the world's largest EV market with over 5.5 million sold as of March 2021. This is a good thing in many ways. China has the most cars in the world and these are replacing harmful greenhouse gases. But these things have their own sustainability concerns. 

There have been the concerns about environmental damage resulting from the extraction of elements like lithium and cobalt. But another concern has to do with the coming problem of waste. 

China is starting to experience the leading edge of this problem. In 2020, 200,000 tons of batteries were decommissioned, and the figure is anticipated to rise to 780,000 tons by 2025. 

In this video, I want to look at China’s looming EV battery waste problem. And what the world’s biggest EV market is doing about it.

The two major companies making and selling chips using the x86 instruction set are some of the most prominent in the tech community: Intel and AMD.

In 2020 Intel sold $20 billion worth of processors to China. AMD had $2.3 billion. Both figures are on par with or higher than what those companies make from the United States. China is a massive market for these two. And China knows it too. So it is interesting to see some Chinese companies coming out with home-grown x86 processors of their own. 

Is a domestic swap in the works? How did China acquire x86 technologies in the first place? The whole thing is worth looking into, to say the least. So I thought to do a video about it.