The European Commission will levy 33 percent tariffs on memory chips sold by Hynix Semiconductor Inc, the world's third-largest maker of computer-memory chips, after backing a complaint by a rival that the South Korean company benefited from unfair subsidies, lawyers for Hynix said.
The tariffs, which the lawyers said were due to be announced yesterday, follow a complaint by Germany's Infineon Technologies AG about alleged subsides given to Hynix in 2001 that helped it to export US$307 million in chips to Europe.
European Commission spokeswoman Arancha Gonzalez and her assistant declined to comment.
European tariffs would come after a preliminary decision by the US Commerce Department to levy a 57 percent tariff on Hynix exports. The US ruled April 1 in favor of a complaint from Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology Inc, the world's No. 2 maker of computer-memory chips, that government-backed lenders in South Korea had unfairly subsidized Hynix.
"The Korean government has been put on notice not to subsidize its semiconductor producers," said Rich Whittington, an analyst at American Technology Research who rates Micron shares "buy" and doesn't own them. Whittington doesn't cover Hynix.
Competitors in Europe, the US and Taiwan complain that South Korea's financial support for the chipmaker has cost them sales.
Last week, Nanya Technology Corp (
Companies that will sign the petition include Mosel Vitelic Inc (茂矽電子), Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體) and Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電子), Kau said.
Hynix's creditors have bailed the company out three times in the past two years, rolling over billions of dollars of debt the chipmaker racked up to invest in the latest production equipment.
Hynix argued that European industry will suffer from the duties, since Infineon can't supply the variety of DRAM chips manufactured by Hynix and doesn't supply directly to smaller customers. It added that makers of telecommunications and consumer electronics can't use chips from Infineon, which are designed for use in personal computers.
"Other foreign chip suppliers will be the beneficiaries,"said Jean-Francois Bellis, a Brussels-based lawyer at Van Bael & Bellis, which represents Hynix.
"They will cause damage to customers and force industry out of the EU," he said.
Micron spokesman Sean Mahoney said the company would only comment once the European Commission announces its plans.
Supply of so-called dynamic random access memory, used to store data while a PC is turned on, has exceeded demand for more than four years as businesses and consumers have curbed purchases, Whittington said.
"Removing or raising the price on one supplier in an oversupplied market won't have much of an effect," Whittington said.
Samsung Electronics Co , the world's No. 1 maker of DRAM chips, would be the most likely beneficiary of the tariffs, especially if PC sales began to grow, he said.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day