Asianometry

In 2005, Thailand became the world's biggest manufacturer of hard disk drives or HDDs. 

As of this writing, they remain the second biggest exporter after China and the largest in Southeast Asia. 

Thailand's dominance in this particular industry tends only to be recognized when something happens to damage it. For instance, floods in 2011 that caused a number of worldwide HDD shortages. 

But I do think - like with the semiconductor shortage - it is worth studying how this situation came to be. And how, kind of like with Malaysia, Thailand has yet to be able to grow as far and fast beyond that as they would like. 

In this video, we will look at how Thailand came to be a leader in the hard drive industry. And the daunting challenges associated with growing beyond that early success. 

Northern Australia is Australia's last frontier and also its most vexing economic development puzzle. 

People have long dreamed of turning its vastness into a bountiful bread basket. It might be possible. But there remain formidable challenges in the way. 

For over thirty years starting in the 1960s, the Australian government built a series of dams to divert the waters of the 650 kilometer or 405 mile long Ord River for irrigation.  

Over a billion dollars went into the project since 1950. And the water eventually did flow. But a (maybe) surprising thing happened: The farms would not make money.

As electric vehicles gain popularity around the world, people are starting to pay closer attention to the batteries going into those EVs. A recent report by the Biden administration singles out large capacity EV batteries as one of four critical industries worth further scrutiny.   Asian-based companies are driving substantial technical progress here. In a prior video, I profiled CATL Group, the world's largest EV battery company by shipments. While they are indeed growing very quickly, CATL's leading position is almost entirely defined by its dominance in the China market. Outside of China, the situation is very different.   In this video, I want to look at another battery market leader, one with considerable strength outside of China. What had once been LG Chem, but is now called LG Energy Solution.   Links: - The Asianometry Newsletter: https://asianometry.substack.com- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Asianometry

I recently attended the 2021 Meet Taipei Startup Festival in Taipei. It was a fantastic, 3-day event and I got to meet a variety of Taiwanese startups. 

Based on my short time there, I put together a list of small startups that I thought are doing something kind of special or noteworthy. 

Let's do something different this time. For this video, I am going to shift focus from Asia to talk about the United Kingdom. 

Northeast England was once a heavy industry powerhouse. But when those industries declined, the region struggled to come up with its next growth industry. 

So when Siemens Semiconductor pledged in 1995 to invest over a billion pounds for a semiconductor fab, the area was overjoyed. The Queen showed up and everything. But the plant never had a chance. Siemens closed it after just 15 months of operation. An aborted attempt to revive the plant fell through. 

What happened here? In this video, we are going to look at semiconductor manufacturing's failure in North Tyneside. 

India is a semiconductor design powerhouse. Nearly every major semiconductor company has a presence in India, designing some of the most advanced chips in the world. 

But once those designs are completed, they are sent to the United States, China, South Korea or Taiwan to fabricate. 

It begs the question. Why can't India fabricate any of the chips they lay out?

In the 1980s, the Indian government attempted to follow China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, and Singapore in creating their own semiconductor manufacturing national champion. 

Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography is the next step on the semiconductor fabrication roadmap. It is a disruptive technology using a new ultraviolet wavelength. 

Dutch company ASML is currently the only company shipping these million dollar machines. But ASML in turn relies on Carl Zeiss in Germany for the all-important optics system. The two are intimate strategic partners. 

The key issue that ASML and Carl Zeiss engineers had to overcome is that high-energy UV light gets absorbed by virtually all materials, which means that lenses are not feasible. The lens material will literally just eat up those rays. Thus, Zeiss crafted an optics system entirely out of multi-layer mirrors. 

It is super cool. In my last video I gave a brief overview of Carl Zeiss the company and a few of their products. In this follow up, we are going to go deeper and look at how Zeiss made a EUV optics system.

As I am writing this, Taiwan is suffering through one of its worst droughts in many years. The northern-western part - Taipei, New Taipei City - is generally fine. There are enough reservoirs. 

But other areas like Tainan, Kaohsiung, Taichung, and Hsinchu are having some issues. Their water infrastructure is not as resilient or their water demand is greater. There are reports in the media of TSMC budgeting for millions of dollars to truck water down to its fabs in Tainan. 

Ah, and TSMC along with Intel and a bunch of other chip companies are building fabs in Arizona. A land inundated with clean, fresh drinking water. 

The company - and the industry as a whole - has long had to deal with water usage issues at their facilities. And the problem is only going to get worse as we progress forward. 

Rio Tinto went back on its word in a tense situation and ended up paying the price. In the early 2000s, China began a magnificent economic growth trend at a scale unlike anything before seen in this world.   That growth, however, found itself dependent on a single valuable commodity. China, the world's biggest maker of things as varied as cabbages to door knobs, does not have enough good iron ore. But Australia did, and so was born a very rich relationship.   But as iron ore prices exploded upwards, tensions erupted between China and the big mining companies. And that led to a monumentally bad situation for everyone involved.   In this video, we are going to explore the tensions that would eventually lead to the Sino-Australian kerfuffle known as the Stern Hu affair.