Outdone by China
The Federation of Korean Industries announced on Dec. 8 that Korea has been outstripped by China in the six industrial fields of smartphones, automobiles, shipbuilding and marine engineering, petrochemicals, petroleum refining, and steel.
In the global smartphone market, Korean companies’ share was 1.2 percentage points short of their Chinese counterparts’ in the second half of this year. Specifically, the nine Chinese handset manufacturers including Huawei, Lenovo, and Xiaomi accounted for 31.3 percent of the market, while Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics posted 30.1 percent combined. Besides, the latter failed to surpass Apple’s iPhone in the high-end market.
In the automobile industry, Chinese manufacturers beat Korean companies in output and global market share alike in as early as 2009. In 2003, Korea’s manufacturing volume and global market share had been 3.37 million units and 5.4 percent, higher than China’s figures at 2.91 million units and 4.7 percent. However, China outnumbered Korea six years later by a margin of approximately 2.43 million cars, and produced 10.97 cars last year to represent 12.5 percent of the global market. In contrast, Korea had to be content with 8.63 million and 9.8 percent.
In the meantime, Chinese shipbuilders and maritime companies have already cast behind their Korean rivals in new order amounts, shipbuilding tonnage, and order backlog.
In the petrochemical sector, Korea and China produced 8.35 million and 18.76 million tons of ethylene last year to take up 5.4 percent and 12.2 percent of the global market, respectively. Chinese oil refining companies increased their capacity-based global market share from 6.6 percent to 13.3 percent between 2003 and 2013. During the same period, Korea’s percentage went up by just 0.2 percentage points to 3.0 percent.
China accounted for 48.5 percent of the global steel market last year as well, more than doubling its share in 10 years, but Korea’s share fell from 4.8 percent to 4.1 percent.