US Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen is calling out China’s ramped-up production in solar energy, electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries, calling it unfair competition that “distorts global prices” and “hurts American firms and workers, as well as firms and workers around the world.”
Yellen, who is planning her second trip to China as Treasury secretary, said in remarks prepared for delivery yesterday in Georgia that she would convey her belief that Beijing’s increased production of green energy also poses risks “to productivity and growth in the Chinese economy.”
“I will press my Chinese counterparts to take necessary steps to address this issue.”
Photo: Reuters
China is the dominant player in batteries for electric vehicles and has a rapidly expanding auto industry that could challenge the world’s established carmakers as it goes global. The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental group, notes that China accounted for around 60 percent of global electric car sales last year.
Yellen’s remarks were to be delivered yesterday afternoon at Suniva Inc — a solar cell manufacturing facility in Norcross, Georgia. The plant closed in 2017 in large part due to cheap imports flooding the market, according to Treasury. It is reopening, in part, because of incentives provided by the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which provides tax incentives for green energy manufacturing.
The firm’s history is something of a warning on the impact of oversaturation of markets by Chinese products — and a marker of the state of US-China economic relations, which are strained due to investment prohibitions and espionage concerns, among other issues.
China on Tuesday filed a WTO complaint against the US over what it says are discriminatory requirements for electric vehicle subsidies. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce didn’t say what prompted the move.
The European Union, also concerned about the potential threat to its auto industry, launched its own investigation into Chinese subsidies for electric vehicles last year.
“In the past, in industries like steel and aluminum, Chinese government support led to substantial overinvestment and excess capacity that Chinese firms looked to export abroad at depressed prices,” Yellen said. “This maintained production and employment in China but forced industry in the rest of the world to contract.”
“These are concerns that I increasingly hear from government counterparts in industrialized countries and emerging markets, as well as from the business community globally,” she said.
The tone of Yellen’s speech stands in contrast to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who met with American business leaders in Beijing yesterday and called for closer trade ties with the US amid a steady improvement in relations that had sunk to the lowest level in years.
Xi emphasized the mutually beneficial economic ties between the world’s two largest economies, despite heavy US tariffs on Chinese imports and Washington’s accusations of undue Chinese Communist Party influence, unfair trade barriers and theft of intellectual property.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS