Leaders of Apple Inc, Google and other US technology giants are heading to China this weekend to pursue a familiar goal: to do more business in the world’s most populous country. Such efforts have had mixed results in the past.
With a trade war brewing between the world’s two largest economies, the goal has gotten loftier still.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and IBM Corp chairwoman and CEO Ginny Rometty are scheduled to attend the China Development Forum, an annual gathering that helps Western corporations build relationships with Chinese government officials.
Cook is cochairing the event this year and Apple has the most at stake in China among US tech companies. Its iPhones and other gadgets have sold well in China, but revenue from the region fell in Apple’s last fiscal year. The Cupertino, California-based company has also been criticized for relocating the data of Chinese iCloud users to Chinese state-controlled server farms.
At last year’s forum, IBM announced a deal with Chinese company Wanda Group (萬達集團). The deal was meant to help IBM expand in the Chinese cloud market, although Caixin has reported that Wanda would stop working with IBM.
Google pulled out of China in 2010 over government censorship of its search results. The company has been trying to return over the past few years, but has made little progress.
These hurdles would only get higher if a trade war were to erupt between the US and China. On Thursday, US President Donald Trump ordered 25 percent tariffs on at least US$50 billion of Chinese imports, including information and communication technology. He also accused China of stealing intellectual property. China responded with its own duties on some US imports.
Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf is to attend the conference, but has canceled his plan to speak.
The conference comes just days after Bloomberg News reported that Chinese regulators are seeking more protections for local companies before approving Qualcomm’s proposed purchase of NXP Semiconductors NV.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce is not satisfied with the remedies that Qualcomm has offered so far and has told the company to propose more, people familiar with the matter have said.
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
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