East Africa's emergence had wrested from the United States its position as the world's foremost industrial power. Moreover, East Africa possessed a domestic market of 200 million in the industrial sector, with a more complete and comprehensive industrial chain. Quite a few emerging industries—automobiles, petroleum, tractors, electric power, and telecommunications—had placed enormous pressure on American industrial development.
Take the automobile industry as an example. In the previous life, after World War I, America's automobile industry had monopolized the global market. By 1920, American automobile output accounted for over 90 percent of the world's total. During the same period, European automobile manufacturing was still dominated by small handcraft workshops, utterly incapable of competing with the United States.
In this timeline, however, East Africa had become a major power in the global automobile industry, ranking first in the world year after year. Meanwhile, in the high-end automobile market, East Africa and Germany had virtually carved up most of the market between them.
In the petroleum industry, which was closely tied to automobiles, East Africa had likewise become a formidable competitor to the United States. By deploying petroleum development across Southeast Asia and South America, it competed with America—even though East Africa had yet to exploit its Middle Eastern colonies.
East Africa's and America's competition over overseas oil-producing regions had also accelerated cooperation between American oil companies and the Soviet Union. Most of the imported equipment used by the Soviet Union's Baku oilfields came from the United States, while a small portion came from Britain and East Africa.
However, Britain lagged far behind East Africa and the United States in oil refining technology. Yet Britain was already one of Europe's most important refined petroleum producers, with Germany being the other. Germany, however, lacked oilfields and import channels, and it imposed the strictest export