Japanese businesses are excellent
The Zaibatsu model has different incentives, particularly when they’re jockeying for position with American internationals on their own turf.
They’re very good at undercutting American industry. But I’d consider the Japanese cartel model flawed in other ways - miserable places to actually work for, agonizingly patriarchal, debilitating drinking/drug culture, zero work life balance, and the pay is shit.
This is our beloved capitalism.
That’s sort of the joke. We are living in the IRL equivalent of people complaining Communism is OP in Victoria 3.
“What do you mean you’re leveraging a highly efficient network of state owned enterprises to obtain materials and utilities nearly at-cost?! That’s cheating!!!”
China has ten highly productive and innovative EV companies in a bloody knuckled price war because it’s state government makes starting and growing auto plants artificially cheap and easy.
They’ve been so busy downsizing their workforce, they forgot how to make a car under $40k
Trump is giving China a chance
:-/
I gotta wonder why we’re writing this article about a rising international industrial power that Americans are trained to hate (China) and ignoring a rising international industrial power that Americans are in more serious tension with (India).
Virtually anything you can say about one could describe the other. They’re both technological trailblazers, voracious natural resource consumers, major carbon emitters, metropolitan hubs with rapidly growing professional work forces, and enormous population centers. They’re both increasingly involved in the Great Game of global politics, regularly flaunting the old western-centric Rules Based International Order, and flirting with territorial expansion in their immediate neighborhoods. They’re both major players in the Global South (specifically East Africa), as leading members of the BRIICS. They’re both building stronger ties with Russia in order to exploit the natural resources of the largest contiguous territory on the planet. They’re both flirting with economic models that sideline the US Petrodollar and the Euro-Centric banking sector.
So why does one of them only ever seem to get write ups like this?
When you see reports come out from fossil fuel companies, they quite literally describe “$X trillion of hydrocarbons in the ground”.
Europe only really has the Baltic as a reserve. They’ve been cut off from much of the Middle East by decades of war.
So, unlike the US, which has become an oil exporter for the last twenty years, Europeans either went woke or went broke.