Globalization and regionalization of markets, technological innovation and short product life cycle, higher entry barriers in markets due to rising costs of technology, consumer tastes have forced firms to form networks of strategic links for competitiveness.
This thesis focuses on the domestic product development in the semiconductor equipment industry where relatively fierce competition takes place. With the strategic alliance between device maker and equipment maker, they have success in domestic product development of semiconductor equipments through technology development process such as imitation, joint venture, technology transfer, and R&D.
The method can be determined by existing demand, urgency, ease of acqisition, market potential, strategic alliance. Especially, this thesis makes efforts to reveal that device maker's assistance policy is very important in choosing the method and that device maker can help the equipment makers in various ways including fund support, supporting technical manpower, market vision, purchase guarantee in order to develop the equipment effectively and transfer upper level technology quickly from the technology supplier. In addition, it is found that the key factors for the successful development of equipment are commmunication, organizational culture, business focus, and so on.
The limitations of this thesis are:
First, lack of considerations for the Government's assistance policy works as an external factor. Second, this study shows a limitation in reflecting real aspects of all the device makers due to lack of data because of the reluctance to expose industries' data. Third, though the number of equipment manufacturers used in this study has grown in recent years, the numbers and sales sizes are still small compared with competing overseas manufacturers. Other important concern as well as weakness is that our equipment manufacturers do not seem to have minds for globalization or global competition in the market. Despite the lack of showing the growth alternatives in semiconductor equipment manufacturers, this study may have some meaning by attempting an analysis in Koreanization of semiconductor equipment under growing fierce competition in the world.
