序三 英文原文

Foreword

The roll-out of 5G across the world will have a tremendous impact on economy, society and government.The chapters collected in this book make a deep scholarly contribution to understanding the technologies involved and the way in which they have been applied in practice.The 5G revolution involves an extended eco-system that has been labelled the‘Internet of Things’.This foreword presents some thoughts about the structure of that far-reaching eco-system and the challenges that presents for firms in this sector from developing countries.

Background

Since the 1980s a revolution has taken place in information and communication technology （ICT）.The revolution has penetrated every sector of the economy and society.It has transformed the way in which governments function.It has transformed financial services.It has transformed every part of non-financial services, including telecommunica-tions, retail, travel and tourism, entertainment, mass media, professional services, healthcare and education.It has transformed every part of the world’s manufacturing system, including aerospace, automobiles, beverages and biomedical products.The revolution has transformed the internal operations of global companies, enabling them to overcome managerial diseconomies of scale.It has transformed also the nature of the R&D process, the nature of their products, as well as the relationship of the systems integrator firms with their supply chain and with their customers.The pace of the ICT revolution is accelerating with the advent of cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things.

The ICT sector has been the leading edge of innovation in the recent era and it will be even more important in the years ahead.It is the sector in which by far the greatest amount is spent on R&D, amounting to over two-fifths of total R&D spending by the world’s top 2500 companies.

2 The ICT industry has been characterized by a high level of mergers and acquisitions, which has contributed to a high level of industrial concentration in the industry.It is a heavily research-intensive industry.In 2018/9 R&D spending in the ICT hardware and equipment sector amounted to 8.4% of net sales revenue and in the computer software and services sector it amounted to 10.8% of sales revenue.

The ICT sector has evolved at tremendous speed.The innovations achieved by scientists and engineers in the firms within this broad sector have transformed the modern world, driven by high levels of R&D spending and ferocious oligopolistic competition from top to bottom of the ICT value chain.Since the introduction of the semi-conductor and the PC, a wide array of new sectors emerged within the ICT industry, but within each sector oligopoly has developed at high speed.

Computer software and services

In the G2500 list, there are 321 firms in the computer software and services sector, within which the top 20 firms account for 67% of R&D spending and 70% of sales revenue.Microsoft has maintained its early dominant position in PC operating systems.In the ERP （Enterprise Resource Planning） sector, the top five firms account for around one-half of the global market.Outside China, Google established a dominant position in search engines and Facebook established a dominant position in social media, which they have maintained since then.Google and Facebook account for over one-half of global digital advertising revenue.Google （Android） has around three-quarters of the global market for smartphone operating systems.

Cloud computing has grown rapidly in the past five years.It is the foundation of the Internet of Things.Three super-large firms—Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet-Google—have leveraged their dominant position in other parts of the digital world to establish an early lead in cloud computing software and services.The three behemoths account for 38% of the total R&D spending and 34% of the net sales revenue for the 321 firms in the G2500 ICT software and services sector.Collectively, they account for almost 60% of global revenue from software services for the public cloud.The customers for the giant cloud companies’ services are drawn from a wide array of sectors, including financial services, automobiles, energy systems, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, media and entertainment, retail, hospitality, manufacturing and government.The three behemoths perform on-demand data storage, data analysis, and machine learning for a wide array of sectors.They offer their customers on-demand cloud services, which means that they can avoid investing in their own‘private cloud’, which may operate at less than full capacity.Their customers benefit from state-of-art network infrastructure purchased by the giants cloud computing companies.The vast size of their network means that they can acquire equipment, which includes servers, routers and switches, more cheaply than small-scale private cloud systems.They play a vital role within the‘Internet of Things’that connects embedded semi-conductors across a wide array of machines.They also invest heavily in data security, including the security advantage of their closed-loop global fiber networks.They require a network of routers and switches to link the centers together, and need huge amounts of electricity to keep the server farms cool.It is estimated that 50% of the electricity used by data centers is devoted to keeping them cool.

Technology hardware

There are 477 firms in the G2500 data set from the technology hardware sector, within which the top 20 firms account for 51% of R&D spending and 66% of sales revenue.Two firms （Samsung and Apple） account for three-fifths of the global market for smartphones（by revenue）.Servers are the workhorses of the whole ICT system, including the private and public cloud.Half a dozen firms, led by HPE and Dell, dominate the global server market.In advanced TVs a single firm, Samsung accounts for over one-half of the global market （by sales revenue）.In telecoms equipment, the top five firms account for two-thirds.The value chain of these industries is also highly consolidated.One firm （Cisco） accounts for around one-half of the global market for telecoms routers and switches.The semi-conductor sector also is highly concentrated.Five firms account for about one-half of the whole market, but levels of industrial concentration are even higher in most sub-sectors of the chip industry.Intel accounts for around three-quarters of the global market for PC microprocessors.Two firms（Qualcomm and Apple） account for three-fifths of smartphone processors.One firm （Samsung） accounts for almost one-half of the global market for DRAM chips and a third of the market for NAND chips.Five firms account for around three-fifths of the global market for Wi-Fi chips.Five firms account for one-half of auto semi-conductors.Moreover, four firms account for two-thirds of the global market for semi-conductor equipment, which is a vital part of the innovation process in the semi-conductor industry.

The technology hardware sector embraces a wide range of sub-sectors in terms of their R&D intensity.PCs, printers and servers typically involve relatively low R&D intensity.Leading technology hardware companies from the first generation of the ICT revolution, such as IBM and HP, have divested their PC and low-end server divisions in order to focus on other parts of the ICT industry, which have higher margins and profitability.Smartphones and tablets involve medium intensity of R&D spending.However, they require high innovation skills in terms of product design and customer understanding.They require also sophisticated systems integration capability.The manufacture of their products involves complex value chains across the world, involving a wide array of sub-systems and components, including software, semi-conductors, screens, batteries and camera lenses.In addition, they involve large expenditures on marketing and branding.Telecoms equipment typically involves a high R&D intensity.Telecoms equipment is typically customer-specific.Innovation needs to closely integrate design, manufacturing and customer understanding.The telecoms equipment company’s brand and reputation are affected critically by the level and quality of support provided to customers once they start using their equipment.

Within the ICT hardware industry, the semi-conductor sector stands out for the very high degree of research intensity.Among the top thirty ICT hardware firms, one-half are specialist semi- conductor manufacturers.However, as well as making complex electronic and telecoms equipment, Samsung, Apple and Huawei also are significant semi-conductor producers.In 2018 Samsung’s revenues from semi-conductors were over US $60 billion, making it the world’s second-largest chip-maker.A significant share of its huge R&D spending of EUR 15 billion （2018） on R&D is devoted to advancing its technological capabilities in DRAM and NAND chips.In 2018 Samsung’s semi-conductor division accounted for over three-quarters of its total profits.If the semi-conductor equipment sector is included, then 22 out of the top thirty ICT hardware companies ranked by R&D spending are in the semi-conductor sector, either as pure-play chip-makers or companies with large semi-conductor sub-divisions.Semi-conductors are a crucial part of the whole ICT industry.The sector sits at the center of the transformation of the modern world since the 1980s and it will become even more important in the transition to the Internet of Things, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.The foundation of this‘connected world’ will be‘hundreds of billions’ of sensors and smart devices.There will be a huge increase in the amount of data that will be generated, transmitted, stored, processed and analysed.

Challenges

Each segment of the vast architecture of the IoT has become high- ly consolidated, with a few companies, almost all from the high-income countries.The IoT is a comprehensive ICT architecture.It includes a huge network of base stations.It includes also a global network of fiber, a widely distributed global network of data centers full of servers, a cloud computing software system, a global array of billions of smartphones, semi-conductors and software within the smartphones, and hundreds of billions of semi-conductors embedded within‘connected devices’.Global security in the IoT needs to be considered not in relation to a single part of the architecture, such as telecoms equipment, but rather, in relation to the whole structure of global data transmission, storage and analysis, and the surrounding value chain.As the world sets out on the journey of 5G, this is a formidable competitive challenge for firms from developing countries.

Peter Nolan

Founding Director, Center of Development Studies Professor, University of Cambridge

注释

[1] The data in this foreword are from Peter Nolan, China and the West: Crossroads of In novation, Routledge, 2022 （forthcoming）.

[2] The G2500 companies are the world’s 2500 largest companies in terms of R&D spend ing （EU, 2019, The 2019 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, Brussels: EU）.They account for around 90% of total corporate spending on R&D.