Well that is what happens when you let the market guide industrial strategy, and very often it is the right call.

But these things take time and significant capital to develop, you often need to be non-competitive for years, doing things in a more expensive way, until you can catch-up. But then you can overtake everyone else, if nothing else due to the momentum of growth and the higher efficiency you had to maintain to catch-up. Just like it happened with oil in the US, or with Germany, Japan, Korea or China recovering from catastrophe.

If you don't do this, you can get cornered, where in principle you can produce a resource much more efficiently in your country, but you can't quite climb over the hill because you are addicted to depending on others as an economy and you don't anymore have the capital, know-how or culture for such things.