Asianometry

In the mid 1990s, two companies dominated the lithography space. Both of them were Japanese: Nikon and Canon. Together, they held three quarters share of the market. 

Then a Dutch company called ASML rose to overtake these two, relegating them to bit players in the industry. Today, the two are no longer trying to compete at the cutting edge. While ASML is now Europe's most valuable technology company. 

In this video, I want to talk about how ASML took the market share and technological leadership crown. And why the Japanese incumbents failed to keep it. 

Look at them icebergs. Out there in the open ocean. Just sitting there. Made of freshwater. Melting away. Melting away into nothing. Nobody doing anything with them. What a waste. 

Look at Australia. Land of desert and thirsty kangaroos. Starving for water. Crying out for it! Is there no possible solution??

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, members of the Australian scientific community seriously studied the possibility of harvesting Antarctic icebergs out on the open sea and towing them back to Australia. 

Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, or SMEE (上海微电子装备) is China’s ambitious project to replace ASML. 

The company has been around for a while, and they have received a lot of attention and cheerleading in the Chinese media. But recent high profile export bans to China have brought them special focus. 

In this video, we are going to take a closer look at this under-covered company, what they have been able to produce, and how they are doing so far. 

India's chip design industry is a multi-billion dollar giant. As fabless chip companies emerged as a real force in the industry, the South Asian country captured more than its fair share of the gains. 

For foreign multinationals, the country still offers amazing, high-class talents at a reasonable cost. But is that really such a good thing? 

In this follow up video, we will take a look at India's rise in the chip design world, the current state of affairs, and the challenges the industry faces in the times ahead. 

Once upon a time, the Australian automobile industry employed 100,000 people. They produced tens of thousands of vehicles for both domestic consumption and export abroad. 

The cars were uniquely suited for the Australian market, and they were prized in the country's rural areas. 

But now that industry has vanished. The last factories, operated by Toyota and GM, closed in 2017. Other than a few units produced for national security purposes, the Australian car-making industry has all but vanished. 

In this video we will return to the Land Down Under and look at the rise, decline and fall of Australia’s automobile manufacturing industry. 

The Zaibatsu of Japan practically ran the nation's economy. Over the span of many decades going into the early 1900s, the families who owned these titanic businesses grew to possess plutocratic amounts of wealth.

Unchecked expansionism allowed their industrial combines to become vast mini-economies within the Japanese nation. But then, over a very short period of time, this vast wealth and income inequality abruptly ended. These families lost their control and then their companies. 

In this video, we are going to look at how Japan's richest families got to be so rich. How the authorities came to attack and consume their fortunes. And what doing so meant for the Japanese economy post-War.

In 2020, China overtook the United States as the world's largest box office. The pandemic had a lot to do with it, of course, but it is still a sign of the times. 

Over the past two decades, the American movie industry increasingly leaned on the Chinese market. Producers and studios bent their movies' content to appeal to Chinese audiences. 

But the Chinese theater market is changing. Chinese studios are making better movies across a variety of genres. And the country is looking to turn its growing movie-making strengths into a massive cultural export machine. 

Hollywood and the Western movie industry hoped China would mature into a cash cow. But China is actually turning into a competitor. In this video, I want to talk about the industry’s coming Chinese competition. 

On the surface, it makes little sense. Singapore has no oil reserves whatsoever. Despite this, Singapore is today one of the world's biggest players in the petroleum industry. And that role has helped the country's rise from poverty to first-world wealth. 

In this video we will see how Singapore came to be a hub for almost everything oil-related, without any of their own reserves. 

When we talk about semiconductor manufacturing, we might bring up images in our head of massive fabs, yellow clean rooms, and people walking around in bunny suits. 

That mental image might lead us to presume semiconductor manufacturing to be this squeaky clean endeavor. 

But when we say "clean", we really mean "clean" in the sense that we want to keep the product free of particles. We really have no idea what is going on in those fabs for the people working and living around there. 

These companies use immense amounts of toxic and carcinogenic materials to make the beautiful chips that power our machines. And, if we were to simply look at the historical record, then there is reason for concern. 

In 1995, there were over thirty different companies competing with one another to build the best graphics chips for the personal computer. 

Six years later, there would be only three. With one clearly in the lead: Nvidia. 

As of this writing, Nvidia Corporation is the 15th biggest company in the world, worth half a trillion dollars. 

Their graphics cards sell out like gangbusters the second they come onto the market. 

And the company is seeking to buy ARM for $40 billion. 

In this video, we are going to look back into the past and see how a little startup came up from behind everyone else to dominate the graphics card industry on route to being the world-leading tech juggernaut it is today.