Why dors the UK have such a poor manufacturing industry compared to Japan and German

When you think about Japanese companies Toyota Panasonic Nikon Canon Nissan Makita Hitachi. Germany companies Bosch BMW Audi etc I can think of hardly any British companies.

Yes. I imagine that in M&A it would be hard to find a more open economy.

I quite like the US idea which we see with Google quite well for example. That is to say that in the US you have split shares for foreign ownership and control. When Google was floated a large portion of ownership was sold however the founders retained controlling shares.

The alternative approach from Germany (though they've eaten bits of our pie) is for government to retain the right of first refusal so that when a British firm wishes to give away equity they would be obliged to offer it to government first. I believe this is the arrangement that the German government have with Volkswagen.

It's protectionist to some degree but if we don't want outsourcing (though there are of course merits to it for us) then we may have to take such steps.

Opinions differ... IMO British management culture screwed up a lot of british industry involved in making consumer durables

When you think about Japanese companies Toyota Panasonic Nikon Canon Nissan Makita Hitachi. Germany companies Bosch BMW Audi etc I can think of hardly any British companies.

That might be a factor but the correlation between "industries that don't exist any more" and "industries that were nationalised" is pretty damn striking. Why was management so much better in making tobacco, which is still a massive British-owned industry, than in making cars, which isn't? Tobacco barons are just better, more likeable people? Why did all our domestic mining collapse yet we are able to manage (and still do manage) trillion GBP portfolios of mines located in other countries? It could be that management was strikingly different in each or it could be that the government kept its hands off mines we owned in South Africa or Australia.

A poster just mentioned the success of the German Mittelstand. Britain's socialist governments had an explicit policy of destroying the British Mittelstand by consolidation on the theory that Mittelstand couldn't possibly survive a world that they believed would follow a path of endlessly greater consolidation. A path it did not in fact follow.

It is hard not to see the - strikingly localised - industrial devastation Britain has experienced as being overwhelmingly a result of government mismanagement.

Lumping mismatched companies together into unwieldy conglomerates was also a private sector obsession until quite recently. Now of course the reverse doctrine holds sway... that it's preferable breaking businesses down into small companies with 'focus' and 'core competencies'.

You could check out GEC - third largest company by capitalisation when the FTSE launched in 84

The Tobacco companies were for a while diversifying all over the place too - the wiki gives a rather misleading account of their once frenzied M&A and seems to concentrate on continued activities rather than all the ill assorted pies they briefly had their fingers in (this might have been partly to insulate them from the effects of possible regulation and litigation related to the tobacco business)

It's doubtful whether the greatest management in the world could make much money mining stuff in the UK anymore.

My point is not that consolidation is always bad (posters on this thread also cite a number of successful German and Japanese conglomerates) but that there is a very strong correlation between companies being subject to government industrial policy and those companies failing. When the government manages businesses, it tends to make mistakes.

There are a number of industries in which British companies are genuine world leaders: biotech, mining/oil & gas overseas, music, mobile (but not landline) telecoms, beverage production, chip design. It runs the full gamut from low margin/low skill to high margin/high skill. What all these have in common though is that they either didn't exist or the government didn't think were important enough to micromanage during the Keynesian Consensus years.

Well of course it could be that companies that were struggling in the first place were more likely to get nationalised. I'm not really a fan of nationalised industries,but it's more complicated than nationalised bad, private good.

Industrial policy and protectionism can take different forms such as choosing the technical criteria for selecting between bids for government contracts so that the home team has an advantage, arguably the UK isn't as good at playing this game as some other countries.

Also I am talking about export technology Germany and Japan bring in huge amounts of money through car exports if you look at this we are ninth in terms of exports

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264623/leading-export-countries-worldwide/