Mannerisms

The first two, Toyota and Nokia do a lot of electronics. It would be interesting to know what proportion of their R&D spend is electronics, I am sure it would be significant.

Having, in an earlier life, had to be involved with preparing annual accounts for publication, there are areas of greyness as to how you can assign costs to R and D. In some companies and in some financial jurisdictions, the bean counters may play up or play down R and D to get the best tax breaks or to present a specific picture to Wall Street and the teenaged scribblers.

Dick, you old cynic, but as a distinguished alumnus of a company which once built a 20k wpm fab in Colorado Springs and called it an R&D laboratory, I suppose you were exposed to corruption early in life. To understand all is to forgive all.

Interesting that 5 of the top 10 happily spend (well at least accept that they have to spend) $1.2bn per drug to get it to market yet the European players in our industry won't even put that each into the pot for a joint European fab and prefer to trust in the Taiwanese to keep them near the top of the allocation list.

That's an excellent point Mike and I heard Michael Heseltine make roughly the same point
when he was deputy PM - i.e. with 2 science-based industries like pharma and electronics why did the UK build world-beating companies in one industry but not in the other? I think the answer was in the quality of the second generation of leaders at GEC (Arnie Weinstock son in law of pioneer Sobell) Plessey (son took over) Ferranti (ditto) and these inheritors of sound companies lacked the vision and the balls to invest for the future. That reluctance to invest has become the prevailing attitude - mandated by the shareholders of the large European companies.