hankyoreh

By Ryu Yi-keun, staff writer
Samsung Electronics vice chairman Choi Ji-sung has confessed to feeling “nervous” about the performance of Chinese companies. “They’re doing the same things we were ten years ago,” Choi explained.
Choi made the comments while attending the 2012 Mobile World Congress last month in Barcelona. At the event, the Samsung Electronics booth was sandwiched between Chinese firms ZTE and Huawei. Chinese companies that had been absent from the exhibition a few years before were now occupying center stage.
ZTE and Huawei ranked fifth and sixth in worldwide mobile phone sales for 2012, coming in behind Nokia, Samsung, Apple, and LG. ZTE passed LG in sales for 4Q11.
Competitive prices and rapid technological improvement are behind the Chinese companies’ swift ascent. China now holds 903 patents for the Long Term Evolution 4G mobile communications technology, putting it third behind the US’s 1,904 and South Korea’s 1,124.
China has been rapidly narrowing the technological gap with South Korea, not just in information and communications but in most areas. A Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade (KIET) brief on March industry trends Monday showed the technology gap between South Korean manufacturers and Chinese ones to be 3.7 years. The gap has been steadily narrowing since KIET conducted its first such study in 2002, falling from 4.7 years then to 4.0 in 2004 and 3.8 in 2007. At this rate, it has narrowed by roughly one year every decade. The latest study examined 628 small, medium, and large companies between June and October of 2011.
The gap was smallest in information and communications at 2.9 years, and largest in light industries at 4 years. The results suggest far faster progress by Chinese businesses in cutting-edge industry. In particular, the technology gap in the area of semiconductors was just 2.4 years.
An R&D director at one South Korean cell phone company said, “The Chinese companies have been coming on strong and are now a threat.
"Since everyone but Apple uses the same Google Android operating system for smartphones, the late-starting Chinese businesses have fewer technological elements to deal with, which has narrowed the technology gap," the director explained.
The number of companies surveyed who reported China being even or ahead in technology was also up sharply from 8.4% in 2007 to 13.8% in 2011. And while the number saying South Korea was five to six years ahead of China was up slightly by 1.4 percentage points from four years before. The number giving South Korea as being three to four years ahead was down fully 5.2 percentage points to 30%. KIET associate research fellow Lee Won-bok, who supervised the study, said, "The problem is that China is catching up with us far faster than South Korea is narrowing the technology gap with the global standard.
“Another big factor is that our technology is focused too much on production and development with an eye to commercialization and short-term effects, and we’ve neglected basic and original technology,” Lee added.
An analysis last year had South Korean manufacturers’ technology level at 81.3% of the world’s best, up slightly from the 79.7% recorded in 2002.
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