Obviously they cannot all be right.
The only that I think is given that will expand its global market share is China. Paradoxically because of the US sanctions and the fact that it relies so much on imports presently.
As a percentage of the market, that's true, but if the subsidies grow the whole market then every block's dollar value of market share can all go up.
Every startup learns this lesson quite early on. It's a heck of a lot easier to grow a market by 5% than it is to take 5% of the market from a competitor, mostly because competitors do things to try to stop you.
I do not have any data though, just thinking out loud.
and of course, for national defense, to have homegrown supply chains.
Is this true? And by what measure? I see nothing but incredible growth driven by cloud, mobile, and AI/ML.
sure, there's technological progress and demand, but the market is in a near pathological state. (very short lifecycles, huge investments required even for fabs to keep up, etc. sure, it's unlikely that it will collapse, as demand is very strong, but market participants are very exposed to external factors. there is a huge discontinuity due to the dilemma of staying put and trying to beat the competition on price, or going all-in and building a new fab or at least upgrading one to be able to offer a newer/better process node. which leads to even more consolidation.)
If we have finally reached the final boss of silicon lithography, then the market will figure out whatever nodes make sense (best efficiency, best performance, best value) and presumably we will need ever increasing amounts of them… especially if future solutions just stack tons of dies together etc. it’s fundamentally a pivot from growing through the tech to growing through packaging and putting more silicon into a product… at higher power and cost. But as that market model matures you will very much continue to need more and more capacity to replace the growth that used to come from Moores law.
They could all be right that their market share will be higher if they adopt this policy than if they don’t.
What OP means is that it's a mathematical impossibility for everyone's market share to increase. It's a zero sum game, for any player's market share to increase, someone else's must decrease.
In that case "They could all be right that their market share might be higher". Because they never operate individually, in isolation. Two people can predict opposite outcomes that could be correct for a coin flip but only one is correct.
More on the point, I think they all invest in the same strategy not because they know they'll win but because they know without it they'll lose. Even so it's guaranteed that some of them will lose.
A multi billion dollar company will not just lay down and die when its shut out from the open market, it will use its muscles to create its own.
Hisense is not the market leader, but they have done a significant leap in the last 5 years (Not all of it through legal means thought)
Taiwan 80% -> 50%
EU 1% -> 10%
US 1% -> 10%
South Korea 9% -> 15%
China 9% -> 15%
And if 4/5 of them ended up "being right" would indicate that subsidy policies are effective, right?
That doesn't make sense given that all the other big blocks are cooperating across borders while China is subject to stiff export controls in an area with real technological chokepoints.
Sure they can, just ban imports. Each country/trade bloc ends up with their own chip.