[alephnerd]

The exact same mistakes as Japan - deciding to concentrate on their large local market which is protected via tariffs, but then completely outsourcing IP in non-target markets via JVs (eg. Renault's JVs in India, Volkswagen's JVs in China, Dassault and Thales JVs in India, Airbus JVs in China), but also failing to attract enough talent from abroad to innovate in these countries.

The Eurozone crisis also completely destroyed Western Europe's competitiveness (like the Asian Financial Crisis and Black Thursday did for Japan).

American companies make JVs abroad as well, but will also help transfer promising employees to the US, give them a competitive salary, and sponsor their visa process.

If you're smart enough to become a MechE for Dassault in India, you're also smart enough to become a MechE for Ford R&D in the US or India. Going from earning €25k in India to €45-50k in France or Germany isn't worth it, compared to moving to America and earning €90-110k.

Germany's automotive industry is a great example of this. In the 1990s-2000s, they began a MASSIVE expansion into China. Chinese consumers ditched their bicycles and motorbikes for the VW Jetta. But while VW continued to concentrate on ICE vehicles, Chinese challenger brands in the 2000s began researching EV technology as they were already the goto suppliers for batteries. Fast forward to today, and now German companies are dependent on Chinese EV R&D in order to build European EV platforms.

[jlangenauer]

This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chinese market, technology transfer was the price to be paid.

(Another example of this is the high-speed trains in China - the first generation was built by JVs with Siemens/Hitachi/etc with an explicit policy of technology transfer, but the newest trains in China are now local, built on top of the technology that has been acquired.)

[alephnerd]

And they're doing the same in India.

There's a reason I mentioned Renault and Dassault - to show that it's not just a China thing.

Every country pushes for JVs, but it's up to the individual companies themselves to defend their IP, or at least integrate the host country's talent base with the home country's innovation system so that it's mutually beneficial (eg. What Japanese companies did in Korea in the 1970s-80s).

American companies do that (eg. L1/2 transfers and O-1 visas) but European and Japanese companies don't as often.

[insane_dreamer]

US companies haven't had any more success in protecting their IP in China and avoiding "tech transfer" than European companies; it's endemic to operating in China ("somehow" your tech leaks from your JV to your Chinese competitors, who in some cases may even be owned by the same group of people through a web of shell companies). (The solar panel industry is a good example of this.)