Deepseek hints that China has mastered the art of ‘kaizen’ – the West should be concerned
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Roula Khalaf, editor of FT, chooses her favorite story in this weekly newsletter.
In the white heat of the space race, America spent millions of dollars of taxpayers developing a ball with a ball that would work in zero gravity. Faced with the same problem that the Russians used. . . Pencil.
This is, uncomfortable, a fairy tale. Both sides tried pencils, and both sides ended with a space pen, a product completely developed in the private sector. But the myth often re -appears as industrial, geopolitical and ideological parables because it is beautifully recorded by the terror that brings all these fields: that another company/side/economic model can, and can be structurally better placed to work smarter and cheaper.
Did the meme of the “Space Pen” return back this week while investors and governments watched Chinese supposedly cheap Deepseek Ai model, wondered if US export controls returned and then lost their nerves about billions invested in a more expensive American approach to the same problem? Of course it worked.
However, more disturbing phrases should be Kaizen – The Japanese concept of a “continuous improvement” that nervously raised nervous awe into American corporate hearts and some cinema, one way or another, now looks quiet overcome. Partially engaging in Japanese Kaizen Masters are underestimated in their own economy.
Kaizen He first entered the International Business Lexicon in the 1980s, when US and European companies had to understand why Japanese companies beat them – at prices and quality – on cars, consumer electronics and semiconductors. Both sides corresponded to recognizing the differentie as a patient, a highly Japanese, better product and process.
Practical effects Kaizen They were extraordinary: they were among the main reasons that the Japanese economy became huge in the 1970s and 80s, and why so many of its companies retain global competitiveness in the incredible range of production areas.
But KaizenEvolution during the long, standing decades after Dugi Japan may be more extraordinary. Once the era of financial excess evaporates, Kaizen It has become a survival superpower: at the same time the fuel of more quality and skinny in corrosive times. The deflation and inability of Japanese manufacturers to provide the price price in their domestic market have reduced the cost of fine arts.
Chinese manufacturers, with their care long -fixing costs and technologies, watched all this carefully and saw ways to make Kaizen its. Deepseek may represent the breakthrough of software, but it is one on the shoulders of the now relentless, gradually advanced hardware sector.
Many will claim that Chinese acquisition of technology at best was an opportunistic and the worst case. Where direct theft or coercion is not to blame (and often), foreign companies have lost key technology for poorly formulated transmission contracts or excessive optimism over the ability to protect IP. But it stopped explaining everything for a long time.
In the latest and visible industrial achievements in China-to-production of cheap, competitive electric cars, consumer electronics, industrial machines, trains and robots of high speed-not Kaizen is now at work. And there are reasons for suspicion that Chinese iteration can, during the time, work faster, more devastatingly more visible from the original.
First, China has numbers and talent for throwing Kaizen To a much greater extent than Japan ever collected. Increases work best when there are many.
Second, this happens in a time where consumers are far faster to identify and communicate when the product is not exactly as they wish.
But the third is that they may be able to pay the speed. As well as direct observation Kaizen In an action in Japanese production operations, Chinese companies, according to the employment agents in Tokyo, have found that they can lure the engineers of the Japanese semiconductor, railway and robotics as advisers. This is not new, the agents say, but now it is sharply accelerated.
Japanese companies tend to withdraw highly qualified people early, for several years during the deflamation period they paid them especially beautifully and implanted less loyalty separations than they may have hoped. They can pay them well with the Chinese company and, without explicitly giving industrial secrets, their value is immense: Kaizen The basis is the procedure of attempted and mistakes, and an experienced engineer can afford priceless, saving costs on what has been attempted but failed.
Tips like: Forget the pen, it was useless.
