Corporate strategies in the international semiconductor industry

Within the complex of information technology industries the semiconductor (SC) industry has become one of the main competitive “battlegrounds” for the major U.S., Japanese and, more recently, European electronics corporations. Most industrialised countries consider the SC industry as strategic for several reasons. It is both a major world industry in its own right and, perhaps more importantly, a vital supply industry to the wide range of downstream information technology (IT) industries. In fact, SC components can be seen as the physical “building blocks” of all the final IT goods industries including telecommunications, computers, office equipment, informatics and electronic consumer goods. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the contemporary strategies of the SC corporations of Japan, the U.S. and Europe in their efforts to maintain and improve their competitive positions. A secondary purpose is to use the case of SCs to explore three widely held assumptions regarding technology and competitive performance: (a) that technology strategy is a crucial factor underpinning corporate performance; (b) that technological leads underpin competitive advantage; (c) that technological capability, is, in general, firm-specific, cumulative and path dependent. ’