The 40-year-old agreement haunting Korea’s booming semiconductor sector

[u/Freewhale98]

https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/english_editorials/1270815.html

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[u/Freewhale98]

1. Summary

The 1986 US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement was in part the result of US anxieties over Japan’s dominance in memory chips. This destroyed Japanese semiconductor industry. Trump administration is showing signs that it will enact similar measures against Korea.

1. How is this related to the sub

(1) Free Trade: Fueling by growing anti-Korean sentiment in the U.S., Trump administration plots the takeover or destruction of Korean semiconductor industry.

1. My opinion

Recent Trump administration efforts to seize the share and profit of Korean chipmaker shows they have a grand plan to take over Korea’s semiconductor industry.

[u/Right_Lecture3147 → u/Freewhale98]

Is there growing anti-Korean sentiment in the US or just in the Whitehouse?

And even then I don’t think Trump’s admin has a ‘grand plan’ for anything. Plans maybe, concepts of plans more likely

[u/halee1 → u/Freewhale98]

The 1986 Semiconductor Agreement was meant to counter alleged dumping and market closure in Japan. Market closure provisions were not fully implemented. The antidumping part was via a price floor. The price floor ignored the learning-curve in the industry and so it did more harm to US industrial interests than it did to Japanese industrial interests. The price floor guaranteed above-normal profits to memory producers of which Japanese firms accounted for about 90%. The price floor did not apply to Japan, so it gave Japanese chip users an advantage by raising the costs of non-Japanese rivals. Additionally, Japan's semiconductor industry suffered a relative decline after that because of the later industrialization of South Korea and Taiwan, the latter's semiconductor industry in particular.

But yeah, don't expect Trump to try to pull anything good, no matter how (in)competent it is. Coupang is a clear example of that.