Comment by alias_neo
10 hours ago
> Qimonda
Sorry for the tangent, I haven't heard this name in over 15 years, I interviewed with them the summer before the final year of my BEng, and was offered a job in China to allegedly built a real-time voice/video communications system between what they said were their three facilities in beautiful looking part of China I can't remember the name of now.
Looking through my Gmail, it was 2008 they offered my the position; and looking at the Wiki page, I'm glad I didn't take the offer, as it appears it didn't last much longer?
Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic NAND and DRAM manufacturers that are set to become giants.
Funny how China has the vision to use, finance and monetize where western governments keep failing.
That's what hurts the most to see. EU says they want a strong domestic electronics industry, but with the exception of ASML, they really don't do nearly enough to grow it or even to maintain it.
It's certainly been interesting to watch over the span of my career so far.
It's really quite interesting thinking back to that time for me in University, every few years something happens that sparks a memory; right now, it's that roughly 2007-2008 my professor was telling me about this "rollable" screen technology that was going to enable rolling/folding phones at some point in the future; a little earlier he'd been telling me about this funky new thing called 'Organic LED' that was going to enable "printing" flexible circuits
He's an FREng (Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering) and was one of the people involved in the invention of the silicon chip.
Had a Gandalf look to him and was a real fountain of knowledge, I lucked out to get the guy as my professor.
Yeah, there was a lot more mentorship in the industry back them.
Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.
Our 4 years terms is short slighted by design.
I don't think this case has much to do with the mono party system but with the state taking interest to support a local industry at a loss but for future security.
Like for example the French government massively supported its aerospace and nuclear industry, and German government gave massive support to its legacy auto industry and they're not a mono party totalitarian system.
So it can be done even in democracies, but you need visionary leaders to spend money wisely on future industry bets and not just on buying votes from pensioners.
The big issue EU now has compared to the past when it kickstarted its nuclear and aerospace industry, is the massive burden of the welfare state that leaves little money for investments into other ventures, and boomers who are the largest beneficiaries of that welfare state, also account for the majority of the voter base, so the major EU economies France and Germany are stuck in a quagmire where the party who wins the elections is the one who goes more into debt for the welfare state.
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EU has 7 years planning interval. Is not bad and tends to overlap the usual 4 years legislature in member countries.
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> Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.
That's not a trait of a monoparty system, or even any totalitarian autocratic system. There are democratic multiparty systems which have plans that spans decades, and autocratic totalitarian regimes that barely put together a coherent multi-year project.
I'm glad the EU isn't subsidising European DRAM and NAND. Those are typically very low margin business. It's unlikely the EU could have competed with China because of labour costs/rights.
Today we have a shortage in this sector and margins are good so it seems like a good idea. But it's likely a European company would have regularly lost money over the last 20 years and become an unpopular drain on EU finances.
>Those are typically very low margin business. It's unlikely the EU could have competed with China because of labour costs/rights.
Well, you can apply this logic to a lot of other industries, like cars for example, they're also quite low margin products now when you ignore the stealership price gouging and artificail protectionism. The problem is if you just let all your manufacturing industry die out of greed and ship it aboard to cheaper labor, you're leaving yourself exposed to geopolitical rivals or even to allies who decide not be your allies anymore because they know they got you by the balls now and can squeeze concessions out of you. <flashbacks of EU's energy ties with Russia>
Then what do you do?
China is willing to play and loose the short game in order to win the long game, while EU is only focused on the short term gains while it's been slowly bleeding leverage and influence to rivals in critical sectors that you can't easily reshore back on a whim in case of another once-in-a-lifetime pandemic or "special military operation".
China's EV success didn't come out of nowhere, it just leveraged all the low margin electronics industry the west didn't want anymore and shipped to CHina, and look at their EV industry versus the EU one today.
Same with Taiwan's success in the semi industry. They started by manufacturing on the cheap dated processes acquired from Philips and RCA, and look at TSMC now.
We're not talking about outsourcing manufacturing of cheap clothes and sneakers here. DRAM, NAND and micro-electronics in general is quite an indispensable part of or modern civilisation and defense now, even without the AI bubble. The longer you ignore your domestic capabilities because the profits aren't as high as you want, the harder it's gonna bite you in the ass later when the shit hits the fan.
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It seems to me (and maybe I'm wrong), but it seems to me that "a lack of IP" increasingly means "we have no leverage to get the licences that we need" in China, and "we have no idea how they used to do it" in the west.
China doesn't need licences. They can just violate western IP law and make lots of money. As every country without a need to placate the IP industry does.
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Same as it ever was.
China is going through the burgeoning phase previous countries have gone through. Although China’s scale is far larger, once there’s a couple of economic troughs things will be different.
Can you name these two manufacturers?
Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. (YMTC) (NAND)
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) (DRAM)
CXMT (dram) and YMTC (nand).