TO SEE the geography of the technology industry, crack open an Apple iPhone. Although the firm that sells it is American, it provides none of the physical innards. The components are almost entirely Asian: the screen is mostly from Japan, the flash memory from South Korea, and it was assembled in China. Apple's contribution is the design and software—and, importantly, integrating the innovations of others.

As goes the iPhone, so goes the broader technology industry. The biggest and most technically clever firms are American and European, but their predominance in research, innovation and production is being challenged by Asian companies. A new report by the OECD puts hard figures on the extent of this steady shift.

Every year around $1 trillion is spent on research and development (R&D) in computing, telecoms and electronics; America accounts for over one-third. But while corporate R&D in America and Europe grew by 1-2% between 2001 and 2006, in China it soared 23%. China is now close to surpassing Japan in total research spending, from almost nothing a decade ago. And as a percentage of GDP, China's corporate R&D spending is almost on a par with the European Union's (around 1%).

The OECD's numbers show that Taiwan now has more high-tech researchers than Britain. And a list of the world's 250 biggest technology firms shows that Taiwanese companies spend more on R&D than British and Canadian ones. That said, the types of job are different: the Taiwanese generally do lower-end work like making semiconductors. More sophisticated tasks, such as designing the chips' circuitry, are still mostly done in the West.

The most impressive growth has been in South Korea. In 2007 Samsung spent more on R&D than IBM. The company has jumped to second place in the number of patents granted by America's patent office (just behind IBM); a decade earlier it was not even in the top ten. South Korean firms spend more on R&D as a percentage of sales (6.5%) than European and Japanese firms (around 5%), and are catching up with American ones (about 8%). South Korea now has more high-tech researchers than Britain and Germany.

The numbers highlight the rivalry between “new Asia” and “old Asia”, says Sacha Wunsch-Vincent of the OECD, one of the report's authors. Regional stalwarts such as Japan and Taiwan are being challenged by China, India and South Korea. R&D spending relative to sales for the leading technology companies in America, Europe and Japan was either flat or falling between 2002 and 2006, but increased in the three “new” Asian countries.

The starkest shifts are in computer services and manufacturing, where the roles of America and East Asia have diverged dramatically. The amount that American firms spend on research in computer services as much as trebled over the past decade. Japanese and South Korean firms, meanwhile, spend hardly anything developing services, and prefer to concentrate on more tangible, if less lucrative, hardware. In computers and office equipment such as copiers, America and Japan actually traded places: America's R&D expenditure on such items fell by one-third between 1996 and 2005, while Japan's more than doubled, to around $13 billion, the amount America used to spend. (India, meanwhile, has concentrated on services, in part because stifling bureaucracy makes it easier to move bytes around than atoms.)

Even the topology of the internet itself is looking less American. In 1999 around 90% of Asia's international internet traffic passed through America; in 2008 the share dropped to 54%, according to TeleGeography, a telecoms-research firm. It is yet another example of how the technology industry, once dominated by America, is becoming truly global in nature.