Japan’s semiconductor industry is doomed to irrelevance unless the government matches the long-term strategic visions being laid out in the US and China, the country’s newly created minister for economic security has warned.
Takayuki Kobayashi told the Financial Times that Japan had historically failed to identify the essential technologies that the country’s broad-based industrial economy should protect and promote to ensure it remained “indispensable” to the wider world.
“The question is how we can establish areas where we excel so that the international community cannot survive without Japan,” Kobayashi said in his first interview with international media.