Prime-movers in a commodity industry

A commodity industry is one in which core technologies in products have matured, and further technological progress is focused upon production. William Abernathy had introduced the concept of an `industrial life cycle´ to depict the transition of a high-tech industry into a commodity industry. [1] This is when the rate of product innovations peak and then declines; and yet the rate of production innovations increase and continue. During this transition the numbers of firms in the new industry also peaks and then declines. Alfred Chandler addressed the problem of which new firms in the new industry would rise to market dominance and called these `first movers´. [4] And in new industries, such companies as Ford (automobiles) IBM (computers), there had been first movers which rose to dominance. These two concepts fit historical patterns in the early times of new high-tech industries - but not over longer times. First movers have not always maintained dominance in a market. For example, Ford lost U.S. dominance to General Motors after the 1920s; and General Motors lost dominance to Toyota after the 1990s. Xerox lost dominance in printing in the 1980s; and IBM lost dominance in computers in the 1980s. Why? What are the criteria for market dominance in commodity-type industries? We introduce the concept of a `prime-mover´ in a commodity industry (as an analogous concept to that of a `first-mover´ in a high-tech industry). After the middle of the twentieth century, the commodity industry of steel underwent major industrial restructuring, with Asian firms emerging as new prime movers in the restructuring. To understand this, we analyze the remarkable global success of the Korean firm of POSCO, established long after the steel industry had become a commodity industry.