China is expected to replace the US this year as the largest exporter of goods to Japan, a news report said yesterday.
According to the report in the Japanese financial daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun, imports of electrical machinery and appliances from China will likely exceed those of textile products for the first time on the back of soaring imports of personal computers and television sets.
The surge in imports from China, which marked Wednesday the one-year anniversary of its entry into the WTO, also comes at a time when Japanese companies are rushing to enter the Chinese market and are exporting a large number of products from that country.
The rapid increase in Chinese imports seems to demonstrate that nation's increasing dominance in the world market as well as the growing interdependence of the two countries, the report said.
Imports from China, excluding those from Hong Kong, totaled Japanese Yen 6.31 trillion (US$51.3 billion) from January through October, surpassing Japanese Yen 6.04 trillion in imports from the US and Japanese Yen 4.51 trillion from the EU during the same period, according to the report.
With imports from China continuing to flood the Japanese market in November and this month, Chinese imports are set to surpass imports from the US in value terms for the first time since the Ministry of Finance began compiling such data in 1961, the report added.
Although imports from China represented slightly more than 60 per cent of those from the US in 1999, they jumped 22 percent in 2000.
And Chinese imports grew 18 percent last year to Japanese Yen 7.03 trillion, just Japanese Yen 640 billion below total imports from the US, the report said.
Imports from China rose 9 percent in the January-October period, and are expected to post double-digit growth on an annual basis, the report said.
Imports of electrical machinery exceeded those of textile products in the January-to-October period, totaling Japanese Yen 2.09 trillion and representing 33 percent of overall imports from China to Japan.
Meanwhile, Japan's exports to China totaled Japanese Yen 4.02 trillion in the January-to-October period, rising above Japanese Yen 4 trillion for the first time.
Lat year, Japan's exports to China totaled Japanese Yen 3.76 trillion.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts