Throughout the entire Second Five-Year Plan, East Africa's total industrial output grew by 187 percent, while during the First Five-Year Plan it had grown by only 103 percent. The results were clearly superior to those of the First Five-Year Plan, and such high growth was inseparably linked to the full-scale eruption of advantageous industries such as automobiles and electric power during the Second Five-Year Plan.
Industries such as automobiles and tractors, in particular, had an extremely obvious driving effect on East African industry and became East Africa's flagship export products.
Although East Africa had previously also been a powerhouse in machinery such as automobiles and tractors, its production and export scale had not been large at the time. But during the Second Five-Year Plan, as related industries developed in the United States and Europe, East Africa began expanding its exports of large machinery such as automobiles and tractors.
By this time, American automobile manufacturers had compressed their costs to below one thousand US Dollars per vehicle. Numerous automakers such as Ford and General Motors were developing rapidly, and the American automobile industry had already begun to take shape.
Therefore, in response to competition from these emerging forces, East Africa intensified its dumping into international markets, delivering a wave of "warmth" to the global automobile market.
The automobile industry alone had an enormous impact on East Africa's national industry during the Second Five-Year Plan. Automobiles were high-value-added industrial products, greatly increasing East Africa's overall industrial output while driving the rapid development of related industries such as bearings, engines, rubber, steel, alloys, petroleum, and chemicals.
In the previous life, the automobile industry had been Japan's largest industry. It accounted for around 10 percent of Japan's gross national product and as much as 40 percent of its manufacturing sector. In Germany, likewise a