China’s Booming Home Appliance Market Hits a Wall
The WorldPost reported last week on the collapse of Tesla. The company, which went public in 2010, had never made a profit and had trouble making the costly investment of opening its plant in Nevada. In its annual report, Tesla said that it would write down its “bad investments” on the balance sheet by $230 million.
Elsewhere in China, another American success story has gone south. Lam Research, which makes microchips for smartphones and other gadgets, bought a huge network of suppliers called GlobalFoundries in a 2016 joint venture, but cut the price of its shares last week by 64 percent.
Of course, the American relationship with China has been a struggle, and the success of American tech companies is a long and imperfect story. Nor is Lam’s loss something new. The Chinese government’s dominance of the tech industry reached peak shrillness last year, when its Ministry of Science and Technology threatened that it would ban the import of some products from the United States and other developed countries. Technology is also a great arena for manipulation by the intelligence agencies of both superpowers.
But Lam’s story is part of a broader and deeper story about the direction China’s most strategic sectors are heading in, and what it means for the rest of the world.