On the shoulders of giants

Interesting meeting of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee last night.
Were shown some figures relevant to levels of investment in microelectronics in 2002.
If you divide up the global investmnet then it seems that 62% of such investment was funded by SE Asia, 20% by America, 10% by Japan but only 8% from Europe.

The point was made that we would be foolish to regard E Asia merely as a location for low cost manufacture as companies over there are now investing heavily in research and development.

I was aware of the upsurge in activity in Asia but was not aware of the scale of the investment.