56% of Apple's revenue is from outside the US. 38% of Boeing's revenue is from outside the US. 58% of Caterpillar's revenue is from outside the US. (Those are the first three companies I checked.)
If American companies took the attitude "America #1, we don't need foreign customers," I don't think you would like the impact the resulting revenue loss would have on the American economy.
Apple doesn’t make much hardware in the USA anymore, so you have to count the software and hardware IP from the actually hardware/finished product, so accounting what percent of value for an iPhone is generated in China/other countries vs the USA. For Boeing it’s slightly easier, but they also have an international supply chain.
By becoming completely insular, you lose the ability to innovate, as you cater to a subset of consumers and as such aren't being pushed to test the limits of the existing status quo.
For example, look at what happened to Sony - they were a darling of the Consumer Technology space and the Apple of the 1990s-early 2000s, but because they concentrating on the Japanese market at the expense of the global market, they fell drastically behind in innovation.
A similar story happened with Nokia, RIM, GM, etc as well.
Competition from players like BYD, DJI, and Huawei has helped incentivize innovation in the Li-on Battery space (eg. Panasonic, Tesla), the low budget drone space (eg. Andruil, Skydio), and 5-6G sector (eg. Cradlepoint, Qualcomm)
An insular America is an uncompetitive America. An uncompetitive America is a weaker America. A weaker America opens political vacuums from the Red Sea to Central Africa to Myanmar.
Primary implies the lack of localization, and localization is a critical piece of innovation, as it forces you to consider additional user experience enhancements.
From a typography standpoint, think about how you would represent Hudum versus Latin fonts on a mobile app or PWA now that Mongolia is deprecating Cyrillic script.
On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.
> On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.
If my feature's primary market is the US, I'm not going to prioritize Japanese localization or GDPR compliance. Those two epics will remain in the backlog until a sufficiently large enough opportunity arises to justify a pivot to meet those feature requests.
I am not going to justify limited engineering resources to localization if the localization isn't aimed at my primary market.
This is why GOOG or MSFT haven't prioritized building billing infrastructure for Naira, but something a company like Zoho absolutely can.
My hunch is Zoho is using Razorpay (YC W15) for payments, and Razorpay has been pivoting to support the Africa and ASEAN markets (like most Indian companies have been for decades).
Did you read the article? The whole point is that African companies are replacing GOOG and MSFT with Zoho because Zoho is more responsive to their needs.
Increasingly, American companies cannot expect to succeed internationally on the strength of brand alone, if they are not willing to customize their product and service offerings to meet local requirements.
This is why China is investing so heavily in EVs and green energy. They don’t want to have to go to war over oil in the future, and they would rather be immune to oil price fluctuations. Same with imported coal and natural gas. It is just as much about national security as it is about environment.
The USA could do the same, but it produces a lot of oil and gas so there is more resistance against it. But they make those a part of the world market, so whenever Russia or the Middle East go nuts, the price of oil rises and affects consumers at home as well as allies, and we feel compelled to be implied militarily.
The problem is that with giant trade deficits since the the Reagan Era, either Americans scale down their consumption habits by a lot, or America needs to export more.
America can't rely on the global appetite for the US dollar and US Treasury Bonds forever to keep consuming what other countries consume.
The Petro Dollar is not going anywhere anytime soon, but it definitely has a future expiration date. The global demand for the dollar and US bonds won't disappear tomorrow, but it will cool down somewhere in the future, and thus America can't let go of international markets, unless it wants to downsize a lot.
And the problem with Downsizing is that due to the absurd levels of wealth concentration, the middle-class and the poor are really poorly equipped for such a thing.
We are not on the 50's and 60's anymore when the US share of the global GDP was almost half of it, if we measure it using PPP, it is only about 15%, less than China. America can't just rest on its laurels, it needs to be globally competitive.
If American companies took the attitude "America #1, we don't need foreign customers," I don't think you would like the impact the resulting revenue loss would have on the American economy.