[simfree]

A small country that effectively operates as an island with angry nuclear-armed neighbors and no natural resources has figured out how to survive in the world through the skills nurtured within its own people.

South Korea doesn't have the privileges that Canada and Finland both have of friendly adjacent neighbors and natural resources, which provide opportunities when Nortel and Nokia respectively stopped succeeding in the marketplace.

That being said, there have been terrible knock-on effects from this societal policy. Brutal work culture, low birth rates and much more.

[DDiggler]

>friendly adjacent neighbors

As a Finn I laughed out loud.

[koonsolo]

Not a Finn, but I found it quite funny too. There were so many other example countries, but they choose to pick to one with a neighbor that is constantly in an active war and has a huge nuclear arsenal.

[blululu]

Finland has friendly neighbors? There is a good reason why they have a draft. A simple check of who is on the other side of their largest border combined with any history book from the last 400 years would suggest the reason.

[guappa]

Well swedes would love nothing more than some "empire strikes back" :D

[mathverse]

Koreans believe they can brute force their way to success but during the last 10year these policies have been failing them.

It does not help that they are naturally fatalists so its always all or nothing scenario.

[maxglute]

IMO it hasn't been failing them, it's kept their nose just above the waterline. Reality is SKR (and JP/TW etc) are developed countries with high tertiary enrollment that have nearly maximized their demographic potential in the sense that they can't really produce more skilled talent to fill what is being lost without immigration. Which would be hard since they can't compete with Anglo countries for same talent pool. So folks in globally competitive industries (like Samsung) are pressured to work 200% harder to squeeze 10% competitive advantage to prevent their shit from getting kicked in. US sanctioning PRC, whose minting OECD combined in talent and starting to compete in tech/hardware brough SKR/JP/TW some time (remember when Huawei was about to stomp Samsung), but the tides are against them.

PRC got similar problem, but it's more they're producing too much talent than opportunties so involution happens. With like 50m more STEM + skilled labour on the way to add the the competition. But one saving grace is PRC has like 150 cities with over a million people that folks can fuck off too and still have decent quality of life. You can always lay flat and chill in a tier2/3 city nearly as vibrant as Seoul/Tokyo/Tapei with less cost of living. SKR/TW and somewhat JP is kind of fucked in that sense, most of the opportunities are in a few geopgraphic grinders where you have to be.

[RCitronsBroker]

being life-or-death micromanaged by imperial Japanese tends to leave some marks

[distances]

Finland has very few natural resources, mainly just forests. And the forestry industry experienced a major decline around the same time as Nokia did.

And there is a long border with Russia, one of the worst neighbours any country could have.

[guappa]

Finland had 1 thing: nokia, and microsoft destroyed it.

[dagw]

Looking at most relevant data it is hard to make an argument the Nokia is doing worse today that it was just before Microsoft bought it. Nokia's market cap is currently close to double what it was compared to the year before Microsoft 'destroyed' it.

[guappa]

But count in % of phones that exist, and see how many pople of the current nokia work in finland.

[dagw]

By the time Microsoft stepped in, Nokia's mobile phone market share had already plummeted, and they'd cut their Finish work force to probably a third of what it was at its peak. Yes Nokia is a shadow of its former self, but most of that happened before Microsoft [0].

Hell if you really wanted to you might even be able to make an argument that, with hindsight, Microsoft saved Nokia by letting it gracefully jettison it's failing phone business, get a much needed cash injection, and refocus on other parts of its business.

[0] Of course some argue that Microsoft actually took over the day Elop became CEO, and everything he did was part of some plan to sink Nokia so that Microsoft could buy its phone business on the cheap.

[tmottabr]

Their downfall happened the day they decided go all in on Windows Phone instead of Android.. And that was 100% Elop doing..

But i don't believe it was a grand plan from MS to screw Nokia so they could buy it..

Some even suspect that MS just bought Nokia because Windows phone was not selling and Nokia was loosing money, so MS was afraid Nokia would turn to Android and they would loose their flagship devices..

So they needed to ensure a phone maker for Windows Phone and wanted go into making their own phones, Nokia had a good brand that they had a good relationship with and Elop was still there to make things easy..

On the other hand, if Nokia had focused on Android from the start or at least had devices on both systems, they had the potential to be the leaders on Android phones by now..

[enra]

Finland’s largest land border by far is with Russia which is not generally viewed as that of a friendly neighbor.

The border between Finland and Russia is 1,340 kilometers (832 miles). The border between South Korea and North Korea about 250 kilometers (155 miles). Also 5.5M people vs 55M people.

[trashtester]

There are few countries in Europe with more in common with South Korea than Finland. For them, Russia is as China is to S. Korea and Sweden is what Japan is to S. Korea.

This is reflected in the structure of their armed forces. Per capita, they have the largest army in Nato if they mobilize.

[Barrin92]

That last part is a little bit of an understatement. With South Korea's birth rate at 0.8(!) they're effectively extinct in five generations. Economic and technical success can come and go, eliminating your biological and material basis for existence is the only non-negotiable thing if survival is what you're interested in. And it's a cliff. You can dig yourself out of a recession in a decade or two, once you've cratered your demographics you're done for the foreseeable future, because even if you raise the birth rate back to replacement, your cohort of young people in absolute terms is now so small is doesn't even make much of a difference.

[wiseowise]

Finland has Russia as a neighbor.