Thanks, I was wondering because nobody mentions our “dominance” in the field here… The Brno Technical Museum has an exhibition of some Czechoslovak-made electron microscopes but from what I understood, they became obsolete like much of Eastern Bloc technology.
Anyway, it’s not our main export by a long shot, it’s just the biggest category where we happen to be #1 by volume. Our country has relatively cheap labor and most of our exports come from assembling various mechanical devices, notably cars.
Have you been to the Czech Republic, anyway? How was it? Do you speak Czech? I see you didn’t capitalize the R, which is a common mistake by Czechs because we don’t have title case.
In 90’s there was some investment in our production and it was saved and modernized.
Now Brno is also development and research hub for electron microscopes and non optic imaging. And it isn’t only the cheap stuff that is made here - from few thousand $ simple inspection devices to multiple million $ for FAB’s in Taiwan.
Our car centric economy is pain, there are loads of other things that we can be #1 or at least one of the main leaders in development… Now when car sales slows our economy tanks.