US President Donald Trump’s “America first” approach is likely to affect Taiwan’s export performance, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Saturday in response to the US president’s inauguration speech.
Economists urged the government to come up with countermeasures against possible effects of the Trump administration, which has been leaning toward protectionism, as the US is one of the largest buyers of Taiwan-made goods.
Department of Statistics Director-General Lin Lee-jen (林麗貞) appeared cautious about the US trade policy after Trump pushed the “America first” theme in his inaugural address on Friday.
Lin said that although Trump needs some time to implement his new trade policy, which is expected to give Taiwanese exporters a buffer against US protectionism, Taiwan cannot afford to ignore the possible changes in business ties between the US and China, where Taiwanese firms such as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) have built up broad protection sites to penetrate the US market.
After Trump’s inauguration, the White House announced its withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact championed by former US president Barack Obama. Taiwan has been keen to join the TPP trade bloc, but Gordon Sun (孫明德), director of the Economic Forecasting Center at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院), said that things have changed and that Taiwan should seek a new approach in an era without the TPP.
Taiwan has been pushing its “new southbound policy,” so it is necessary for the nation to link this policy and its trade ties with the US, Sun said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
RSS