Conclusion and Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

Firstly, when I first designed the project, I did not take into consideration of the difficulties in acquiring sector-specific investment record from the government. Statistics regarding state-led investments are scattered through the Internet and thus become difficult to analyze systematically.

Secondly, newspaper title is not the most effective source of data for the purpose of this project to generate significant insights on how the policy trends differ between Japan and China. The results of both countries’ scrapping are very similar, which is likely due to the same keyword search and the generality of journalistic titles.

Thirdly, private-sector-led domestic investments compass too many elements and I have not found a database detailing every investment that was made by companies in digital technology. M&A deals are a good indicator of which industry of private sectors in Japan and China are most active in acquiring technology-related businesses and how the two countries’ private sectors changed their pace in acquiring businesses over time.  

Overall, I have encountered many obstacles in implementing my project design due to the lack of consideration of its scope and availability of resources. In the future, I shall start by seeking conclusive, accessible databases and then consider which aspects of the topic I can further study and contribute to the current literature. 

Conclusion

Besides the issues in mapping, I visualized the Bloomberg database in Tableau in a few other forms and have founded a few significant results.

While the media narratives seem to focus more on China, Japan is still a very prominent player in M&A all around the world. Since 2000, it has led nearly 3000 deals with a total value over 300,000 million USD. Japanese companies are No.1 in M&A and far above companies in Hong Kong, China. As shown on the map, it also has a very diverse investment portfolio all around the world, with the U.S. companies being its major acquisition target. Moreover, companies in Japan across sectors: consumer, technology, telecommunication, industrial, etc, have been leading M&A deals, showing an all-industry prosperity in investing overseas in technology companies. (Note: the acquirer itself does not have to be in technology sector, but the targets are related to technology) As discussed in the background section, Japan's telecommunications tycoon, Softbank, is the leader in M&A, followed by its e-commerce platform Rakuten. As shown below, Chinese companies are active in cross-border M&A but the volume is not comparable to that of Softbank and other Japanese companies. 

Through multi-dimensional assessments of digital developments in Japan and China, I have found that China has been focusing more on developing digital infrastructure through state-led investments in broadband Internet but its private sectors, though booming in recent years in e-commerce and telecommunications, have not been investing aggressively overseas. Although the western media have been devoting more of their attention to China in the 21st century, it is important to recognize that Japan's private sectors in several major industries are still very strong in investing in technology all around the world. Although the domestic economy in Japan has experienced stagnation in the past 10 years, we should also be aware of overseas investment landscape when we evaluate the geopolitical power of China and Japan now and in the future.