‘Jumping Aboard’ a New Sectoral System of Innovation: The Strategies of South Korea and Taiwan in Liquid Crystal Displays

In Chapter 4, it was discussed how Japan caught up with the US in semiconductors. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s South Korea turned the tables on Japan and caught up with it in semiconductors. While South Korea’s success in the semiconductor industry is well known, and is analysed later, what has so far gone relatively unappreciated is the progress it has made in TFT-LCDs. Within a period of approximately five years, South Korea had become the world’s second biggest producer of TFT-LCDs, and then it proceeded to overtake Japan. At the beginning of the 1990s, the joint objective of the government and chaebols1 was to increase the country’s share of the global market from 2.5 per cent in 1992 to 7.5 per cent by 1997.2 That objective has not only been achieved, it has been surpassed by an enormous margin. In 1997 South Korea’s global market share was estimated to have been anywhere between 10 per cent,3 and 19.9 per cent.4 By 2003 it had increased to 44 per cent.5 South Korea has managed this by using a very similar strategy to the one used in the semiconductor industry.