한국반도체 산업의 성장 요인 분석

An Analysis of Factors Influencing the Growth of Semiconductor Industry

The semiconductor industry has several main characteristics. First, it is an industry in which technology gap happens very rapidly among U.S., Japan, and other developed countries. Second, it is a very capital intensive industry, involving a huge amount of initial and continuous investment. Third, it is a knowledge intensive industry: the role of technical skill and human resource for sustaining research and development. And fourth, the life cycle of products is very short, and in some instances is getting shorter. As a result of these features, this industry to Korean chaebol is very new sector as compared with other industry. Currently, Korean semiconductor industry is now one of the top memory design and production technology owing to technology absorptive skill of Korean semiconductor companies. In particular, the success key of Korean semiconductor industry is because of a huge amount of investment, entrepreneurship, and international environment change. First of all, external environment factors affect high speed growth of Korean semiconductor industry. For example, limited export to U.S. of Japanese semiconductor products since a U.S.-Japan semiconductor trade agreement in July 1986, EU-Japan export minimum price of semiconductor in January 1990, and the shortage of 256K DRAM and 1M DRAM in 1988. As mentioned, Korean semiconductor industry has several determinants of success based on investment pattern. First, Korean semiconductor companies concentrated resources to DRAM. While Japanese and American semiconductor companies not concentrated resources to this sector because of excessive organizational expansion and loose decision-making system. Second, Korean semiconductor companise continuously invested huge amount of capital in semiconductor facilities. While Japanese semiconductor companies not invested capital because of minus growth of Japanese economy.