After 31 years, South Korea has regained its deficit with China**.
Japan had a deficit with China last year, so why can South Korea continue to run a surplus?
South Korea's pillar industries are mainly semiconductors, shipbuilding, and automobile manufacturing.
Japan and South Korea crossed the middle-income trap in the 80s and 90s, respectively. Theoretically speaking, taking this step means that it occupies an important position in the global industrial division of labor, as long as you don't fool around, you can basically ensure that the people can be rich and free in the future, and the hereditary replacement.
In the last century, without the term "high-income trap", no one would have realized that capital had developed to the extreme, and would have frantically pursued a bubble-blowing faster financial industry and produced a serious process of de-industrialization.
In addition, no one would have thought that China, which has undertaken a large number of low-end labor-intensive industries, would achieve involution in developed countries in terms of industrial scale and depth.
In the eyes of the West, the size of China's industry has seriously affected the capital on which they depend. If it is allowed to develop, there will be only two kinds of countries left in the world, one is to export resources to China, and the other is to import Chinese industrial products.
And all the industrialized countries that have already crossed the middle-income trap will either become the former, or sooner or later.
The problem is that neither South Korea nor Japan is qualified to be the former, because the depth of their countries dictates that they have no resources at all.
And the latter, where does the money come from?
As a result, there is a high probability that South Korea and Japan will not even have a chance to become Latin American, and will eventually become self-sufficient agricultural countries.
So since the beginning of this century, the wings of Korean industrialization have been gradually removed one by one...
South Korea's Samsung mobile phones used to hold the top spot in China.
In 2002, Samsung mobile phones officially entered the Chinese market, and after ten years of unremitting efforts, in 2012, the sales volume of Samsung smartphones in China reached 30 million, and the market share reached 177%, firmly occupying the top spot in China's mobile phone market.
But in 2016, Samsung released models such as note7 and s7 "grenades", and then Samsung's mobile phones began a series of ** cases, and even on the plane there were ** cases, and then Samsung's sales plummeted.
By 2018, Samsung's mobile phone sales in China were only about 3 million, with a market share of 08%, basically zero.
More than 20 years of turbulent changes are like a dream of Nanke, and Samsung has never climbed up from the Chinese market.
Of course, apart from the Chinese market, Samsung is still the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, with shipments higher than Apple and Xiaomi, ranking first in the world. Samsung's global shipments in the third quarter of 2023 were 58.8 million units, up 10. QoQ3%, down 82%。Despite the year-over-year decline in Samsung's shipments, Samsung's market share slipped to 19% in the quarter from 21% in the same period last year due to growth from other brands.
Although Samsung mobile phones do not make money in China, they still make money in the world, but this will inevitably affect South Korea's exports to China, and the surplus becomes a deficit step by step.
The same goes for car manufacturing.
In 2002, Hyundai Motor Group officially entered China, and it took only five years for Hyundai Motor Group to sell 1 million vehicles. From 2011 to 2014, the market share of Korean cars in China was as high as 10%.
But as with mobile phones, the Korean auto industry is an endless downhill road after a dream. From January to April 2022, the sales of Korean cars in China were only 110,000 units, a year-on-year decrease of 433%, and its market share in China has increased from 27% fell to 18%。
Like mobile phones, although the status of Korean cars in China is not good, Hyundai-Kia Group's global sales in 2022 will reach 6.83 million units, ranking third in the world.
So apart from mobile phones and cars, only semiconductors remain.
Samsung, as the largest chaebol group in South Korea, although the mobile phone in the Chinese market is not profitable, it can be reaped from other businesses.
So under the pretext of various factory fires and power outages, Samsung's solid-state drives began to take off.
By around 2016, the 128G SATA interface SSD has risen to more than 300 yuan, and it is still rising.
Finally, in 2018, Samsung Semiconductor's sales reached a record $75.9 billion, and what S7 grenades and Orion CPUs were all scum.
Samsung's semiconductor business has continued to boom until now, and its sales still reached $71.5 billion in 2022.
But. Profit **9575%
This figure is obtained when there are no fires and no power outages throughout the year...
In 2023, even if Samsung's sales meet its own expectations, its profit will only be half of 2022 at most...
And shipbuilding.
China's shipbuilding industry has been a competitor to South Korea's shipbuilding industry since 2010, and both sides have been catching up with each other. In recent years, as the profits of the shipbuilding industry have continued to decline, China has almost swept away the South Korean shipbuilding industry by relying on huge scale effects.
As a result, more than a dozen shipbuilding companies have closed down in South Korea since 2010, including Hanjin Shipping, South Korea's largest shipbuilding industry, and other large-scale shipbuilding companies.
A very interesting statistic is that Hyundai Heavy Industries, the largest shipbuilding company in South Korea, had an operating income of about $12.2 billion and a net profit of 87.2 billion US dollars in 2021$60,000 ...
So in 2022, South Korea had its first ** deficit in 14 years, and the amount reached a record $47.2 billion, a record high.
The communications industry has collapsed, the shipbuilding industry is no longer good, the semiconductor industry is also struggling, and there are few pillar industries left in South Korea.
Japan also has industries such as machine tools and manga, but what about South Korea?