Reading Global(2021.12.16)
The "king of home appliances" has become a thing of the past, and the life of Japanese color TV hangs in the balance
Kyodo News Agency reported on the 16th that Japanese color TV was once known as the "king of home appliances", and domestic manufacturers have long led the world, and now they have a lifeline. Manufacturers such as China and South Korea, which have launched affordable products, are even better, and domestic production is like a candle in the wind. Although companies have given up going it alone and desperately trying to maintain their competitiveness, the prospects for survival remain bleak.
In the global TELEVISION market, Japanese manufacturers have had a brilliant presence. In the second half of the 2000s, when flat-screen televisions became popular in developed countries, Japanese manufacturers, led by Sharp, ranked among the best in the world.
In the 2010s, the map of power changed dramatically. Low-end cheap models are popular in China and Southeast Asia, and South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Chinese manufacturers have invested heavily in strengthening their offensive. Although Japanese manufacturers have shifted to a high value-added route that emphasizes high image quality, sales have gradually declined.
According to the statistics of the British research company Omdia, the first shipment share of flat-screen TVs in 2020 is Samsung, accounting for 21.9%. The top 5 are all Chinese and Korean manufacturers, with Sony ranked 6th in Japan, and Sharp and Panasonic ranked 10th and 12th respectively.
Forced by a decline in profits, Hitachi Manufacturing stopped domestic sales in 2018. Mitsubishi Electric also announced last month that it would discuss withdrawing from the LCD TV business in the future. Due to the large number of people required for the assembly of television sets, manufacturers are accelerating the shift overseas with lower labor costs. Today, among the large electronic appliance manufacturers, only one of the Sony Group's factories in Inazawa City, Aichi Prefecture, continues to produce domestically.
Manufacturers have pinned their hopes on cooperation with competitors, such as outsourcing production or sourcing materials from outside. Panasonic decided to streamline its own production models and outsource the mass production to TCL. Regarding panels, which are considered to account for more than half of the production costs of flat-screen TVs, Panasonic and Sony are also sourcing from outside.
Toshiba sold its TV business to China's Hisense Group in 2018 and has effectively exited. However, Hisense still uses Toshiba's "REGZA" brand. By maintaining brand power and reducing production costs, it is especially popular in the Japanese domestic market.
A senior executive of a large manufacturer said: "It has become a thing of the past for domestic manufacturers to regard TV sets as star business. Every company is now investing in infrastructure and business for corporations, hoping that there will be no more TV and TV chatter. ”
Japan's semiconductor market share is zero after 8 years?
Japan Economic News reported on the 16th that the global share of Japanese semiconductors will be reduced to zero by 2030. This is a forecast chart on page 7 of the meeting material "Semiconductor Strategy (Outline)" released by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan in June, which sounded the alarm bell.
If Japan is making progress in 2021, it is to successfully attract the world's largest foundry company, TSMC, to Kumamoto. However, for the Huge Subsidy of 400 billion yen given by the Japanese government, there are views that there are problems with fair trade. And it's not Japanese semiconductor manufacturers that get a share, and it's also a 10-year-old technology that invests in "electrical wiring widths of 20 nanometers (1/1 billionth of a nanometer)," which is also mindful.
Makimoto, a director who heads semiconductors at Hitachi Manufacturing and Sony, listed the decline caused by the 1986 Japan-U.S. Semiconductor Agreement (which encouraged the use of foreign products in the Japanese market), the negative impact of the successful experience, and the lack of leaders, and said that "the problem is the weakening of the ability to create new final products."
The 20-nanometer products produced by TSMC in Japan will be used in image sensors and automotive MCUs for smartphones, but in the United States, a factory is currently being built to produce cutting-edge 3-nanometer products. That said, the concern is that companies that design and manufacture AI chips with high added value will be born outside of Japan.
If the US IT (information technology) giants take action, the biggest problem may be the gap in financial strength. Needless to say, the gap in Japan and the United States is the value creation ability of enterprises, in other words, the gap in financial strength.
Japan's Erbida Memory fell into operational bankruptcy in 2012, and the extent to which Kioxia Holdings (formerly Toshiba) can operate independently as a Japanese company remains unknown. To prevent the "incense" of Japanese semiconductors from being extinguished in the remaining 8 years, it will also require the determination to catch up with the American vitality and animal spirits shown by the creation of corporate valuations. As long as TSMC is attracted, the discussion of providing subsidies is far from enough.
Volkswagen will produce fewer cars in 2022 than this year
Reuters reported that Volkswagen quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying on the 16th that due to the continuous problems in semiconductor supply, it is expected that the output of cars in 2022 will be even less than this year.
Volkswagen last week lowered its 2021 auto delivery forecast from 9.3 million to 9 million, and the current chip shortage is likely to continue at least until early 2023, the report said.
In the worst-case scenario, next year's car deliveries could drop to 8 million, but even if things go relatively well, deliveries could be slightly lower than this year, the report said.
Volkswagen declined to comment on the report, saying it expected a slight easing of the supply situation in 2022, but the situation in the first half of this year will remain very volatile.
Automakers, including BMW and Daimler, have said that they expect the chip problem to continue until 2022, and BMW confirmed to Reuters on the 16th that it expects the crisis to ease until the second half of next year.
Whether buying chips directly from manufacturers, reconfiguring cars, or producing cars with missing parts, many automakers are being creative in coping with a global shortage that some had expected to ease early next year.
Due to supply bottlenecks, Volkswagen's Audi and Skoda extended their Christmas holiday to January 10. The company expects this to continue "for months."
With the boom in converting digital images into assets, the size of the NFT market reached $22 billion
The Guardian reported on the 16th that this year, as the frenzy of collectibles such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Matrix avatars turned digital images into major investment assets, the global non-homogeneous token (NFT) market reached $22 billion.
NFTs have received similar warnings from senior investors about cryptocurrencies: they are symbols of an unsustainable digital gold rush. NFTs grant ownership of a unique digital item to someone, even if the item is easily copied. Ownership is recorded on a digital distributed ledger called a blockchain.
Data from DappRadar, a company that tracks sales, shows that NFTs will trade $22 billion in 2021, while the lowest market capitalization (measured collective value) of the top 100 NFTs ever issued is $16.7 billion.
This year's most valuable NFT auction is a digital collage of "Every Day: 5,000 Days" created by American digital artist Mike Winkelmann (nicknamed "Beeple"), which was auctioned for $69.3 million in March, making it one of the most valuable works of art sold by a living artist. Another of his pieces, Human One, sold for $29 million.
Other multimillion-dollar NFTs include the Bored Ape Yacht Club, made up of 10,000 NFTs represented by cartoon primates, which were used as profile photos on social media accounts, raising $26.2 million.
DappRadar said a key factor in the surge in NFT deals is that mainstream businesses have entered the battlefield.
"Hollywood, sports stars and big brands like Coca-Cola, Gucci, Nike and Adidas are all making a name for themselves in this space, providing a new level of exclusivity for NFTs. The appeal of these well-known brands has profoundly influenced the NFT and the blockchain industry as a whole. ”
Football fans have long been targeted by NFT marketing – including NFTs backed by former England players John Terry and Wayne Looney – and experts warn they are risk assets that are unregulated in the UK. George Monaghan, an analyst at globalData, a research firm, said it will take years for NFTs to operate like traditional markets.
Today's picture
Japan's NFT digital art trade may set off a storm in the art world
December 16, 2021 – Artists in Japan, affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, are now digitizing their creations, selling their designs in the form of non-homogeneous tokens (NFTs), virtual objects that have taken a storm in the art world. Pictured here is a visitor at the "CrypTOKYO" blockchain physical art exhibition held in Tokyo in June this year, where a visitor uses a mobile phone app to view artist Yonehara's work "Sup".
(This article is compiled from Kyodo News Agency, Nippon Keizai Shimbun, Reuters, Guardian)
Economic Observation Network intern reporter Zhou Yuqing sorted out