In a world marked by fierce competition between Western countries and emerging countries such as China, industry is set to play an important role — a point underlined in the Draghi Report on European Competitiveness in 2024. McKinsey’s Global Institute report focuses on a category of industries which are very likely to profoundly changing businesses on a global scale, as well as society, and which it describes as “competition arenas”.
Bradley Chris et alii, The Next Big Arenas of Competition, McKinsey Global Institute, October 2024, 213 p., and Wong-Leung Jennifer, Robin Stephan and Cave Danielle, ASPI’s Two-decade Critical Technology Tracker: The Rewards of Long-term Research Investment, ASPI (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), August 2024, 72 p.
These industrial sectors have two characteristics: they account for a very large share of the growth in industrial production; and the market shares held by companies in each of them often change hands. This shows that they are the focus of intense competition generated by new ‘clusters’ of technologies and business models, with high levels of capital mobilisation and substantial investment in R&D activities. McKinsey notes, for example, that among the top 100 companies by market capitalisation in 2005, only 46 will remain in 2020. In this top 100, the other 54 had been replaced by companies b
