Abstract
The Chinese government has been promoting core industries in accordance with the 'Made in China 2025'. As a result of injecting huge subsidies to develop core industries, a great success has been achieved in the electric vehicle and battery industry, however, the semiconductor industry has almost no performance. This study aims to examine whether the subsidy policy of a developing country helps their own domestic firm to overcome the first mover advantage of an advanced country's firm. From the game theoretical analysis, the results have shown that the subsidy policy of the developing country's government creates the profits shifting effect which arises from the developed country's firm to the developing country's firm. When there exists R&D efficiency gap between the two firms, however, most of these profit shifting effects are offset, which implies that the subsidy policy of developing countries is likely to fail.