Applauded by Switzerland’s business sector, the country’s free-trade deal with China is heavy with symbolism, coming as Beijing locks horns with the EU in a raft of commercial disputes.
The staunchly non-EU Swiss inked a preliminary accord on Friday during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s (李克強) first visit to Europe since taking the helm in March’s once-in-a-decade power transfer.
The final free-trade agreement (FTA) is set to be signed in July, capping two years of talks.
“This has huge meaning for global free trade,” Li said in Switzerland, explaining that it sends the world “a strong signal about the fight against trade and investment protectionism, as well as the liberalization and facilitation of trade.”
Swiss Economy Minister Johann Schneider-Ammann echoed that.
“The FTA will not only further develop and deepen our bilateral relationship, but it will also contribute to much needed progress towards global liberalization of trade and to curbing protectionism,” he said.
In Switzerland, Li took the opportunity to launch a broadside against the EU, challenging its punitive import duties on Chinese-made solar panels, as well as moves against the mobile telecommunications sector.
The EU says that such Chinese products are being dumped on its market, hurting European firms, but Xinhua news agency quoted Li as saying the moves “harm others without benefiting oneself.”
The economies of China and the 27-nation EU are tightly linked.
The EU is China’s top export market, while China is second to the US for EU exports.
However, the balance is largely in China’s favor, with Chinese exports to the EU worth US$375 billion last year, and EU exports to China, US$186 billion.
In contrast, Switzerland is one of the rare Western countries with a positive trade balance with China, its third-ranked partner after the EU and the US.
Swiss-Chinese bilateral trade totaled US$26.3 billion last year, with US$22.8 billion of that in Switzerland’s favor.
Its top exports to China are watches, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and machinery, while textiles and machinery head the list of imported Chinese goods.
“This free-trade agreement is an important step into the right direction. It will facilitate the access to the Chinese market and will strengthen the competitivity of Swiss industry’s products. And it will also provide advantages compared to international competitors, especially from the EU,” Ivo Zimmermann of the Swissmem engineering federation said.
He said he could not comment in detail until the FTA was signed, but that he expected “substantial facilitations” for exports, even if Chinese tariffs may not be reduced on all goods.
Even the country’s solar power body, Swissolar, sees no threat.
“In the Swissolar perspective the free-trade deal with China has to be judged positively,” said its head David Stickelberger, noting that Swiss manufacturers focus on niche markets and that cutting duties on Chinese panels would lower end-user prices in Switzerland.
Jean-Daniel Pasche, head of Switzerland’s FHS watchmaking federation, also gave the thumbs up.
“It will give a legal framework to our cooperation,” he said.
He said his industry was hoping to see a fall in Chinese import duties on watches — currently at 12 percent to 16 percent — as well as better safeguards against counterfeiting.
Besides inking the FTA plan, the two countries also signed a deal boosting financial sector ties, amid reforms of the Chinese sector.
“Emerging markets such as China are attractive because there’s a huge variety of activities ongoing at the same time,” said Riccardo Moretto of Zurich Insurance Group.
“Populations are large and demographics are favorable, with a high proportion of young people. There is also growing GDP,” he said.
During his Swiss visit, Li underlined that the Swiss FTA was the first with one of the globe’s 20 leading economies.
China signed its first European FTA last month with non-EU Iceland, and Beijing has been pressing the EU for a similar accord.
Despite the China-EU spats, Brussels said on Thursday that it aimed to negotiate an investment protection agreement with Beijing, which would be the first step on the FTA path.
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