The EU yesterday announced a probe into China’s medical devices market, prompting an immediate accusation from Beijing that the bloc was engaging in “protectionism.”
Brussels fears China is favoring its own suppliers when it comes to the procurement of medical devices. The EU’s official administrative journal, announcing the probe, set out ways that could be happening, including through a “Buy China” policy.
The EU also has concerns that China might have restrictions on imports as well as imposing conditions “leading to abnormally low bids that cannot be sustained by profit-oriented companies,” the notice in the journal said.
Photo: Reuters
Beijing lashed out at the investigation, with Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) saying it would “damage the EU’s image.”
“All the outside world sees is it [the EU] gradually moving towards protectionism,” Wang said, calling on Brussels to “stop using any excuse to groundlessly suppress and restrict Chinese business.”
China’s medical devices market is the second largest after the US, worth about 135 billion euros (US$144 billion) in 2022, according to a report by China-focused think tank Mercator Institute for China Studies last year.
The EU probe is the first under the bloc’s International Procurement Instrument which seeks to promote reciprocity in access to international public procurement markets.
“The ... restrictive measures and practices put at a significant and systemic disadvantage Union [EU] economic operators, goods and services as they systematically favor the procurement of domestic products to the detriment of imported ones,” the official journal said.
If the investigation finds unfair behavior by China, the EU can limit Chinese companies’ access to the 27-nation bloc’s public procurement market.
The investigation is to conclude within nine months, although the European Commission can extend this by another five months, the journal said.
Beijing is “invited to submit its views and to provide relevant information” and can hold consultations with the European Commission — the EU’s trade authority — “to eliminate or remedy the alleged measures and practices,” the text said.
Brussels has launched a wave of investigations targeting China over the past few months, looking into green tech subsidies, and the EU also provoked Beijing’s ire earlier this month after announcing an investigation into Chinese wind turbine suppliers.
Other probes have focused on Chinese subsidies for solar panels, electric vehicles and trains as Brussels seeks to move away from excessive reliance on cheaper Chinese technology.
The latest investigation was announced after German authorities arrested an aide to a far-right German Member of the European Parliament Maximilian Krah on suspicion of spying for China.
On Tuesday, the commission announced surprise raids were carried out in the EU offices of an unidentified company that makes and sells “security equipment” as part of a probe into foreign subsidies.
The Chinese chamber of commerce in the EU denounced the raids in the Netherlands and Poland.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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
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