After Sweden, there are other countries outside the USA that are exciting for me when it comes to technological bottlenecks. Today: Japan.
It's not primarily about the well-known names, not about Toyota, Sony or Nintendo. It often gets interesting a few levels deeper in the value chain.
Four Japanese examples from my portfolio:
- Sumitomo Electric $5802 (-2,54 %) - Materials and infrastructure for modern photonics systems
- Furukawa Electric
$5801 (-6,65 %) - Fiber optic and optical transmission technologies
- Harmonic Drive Systems
$6324 (-0,44 %) - Precision drives for robotics and automation
- Astroscale
$186A (-2,25 %) - Infrastructure for maintenance and disposal of satellites in orbit
These cover three different (of the four) DIBS* clusters:
🔹 Digital AI
Sumitomo Electric and Furukawa Electric
🔹 Physical AI
Harmonic Drive Systems
🔹 Space
Astroscale
*DIBS stands for Dynamic Infrastructure Bottleneck Stack
What these companies have in common: They are not located where the market's attention is. Rather where new technologies become scalable in the first place:
- In the case of digital AI, this means optical data transmission, for example
- In physical AI, especially robotics, high-precision motion control
- In space, the future ability to maintain and move satellites or remove them from orbit in a controlled manner (debris removal)
Japan strikes me as a kind of infrastructure layer of the global technology industry. Such companies grow slowly, unspectacularly and largely out of the public eye. This is precisely why they are overlooked by many investors.
All of these stocks are also part of my portfolio and my three wikifolios on bottlenecks.
