China is to cut the import duty on passenger cars to 15 percent, boosting automakers such as Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) and Ford Motor Co just as the immediate threat of a trade war with the US recedes.
The Chinese State Council has decided to reduce the levy from the 25 percent that has been in place for more than a decade, said people familiar with the plan, who asked not to be identified as the information is not public.
Bloomberg News last month reported that China was weighing proposals to reduce the car import levy to 10 percent or 15 percent.
A reduction in import duty follows a truce between US President Donald Trump’s administration and Chinese officials as they seek to defuse tensions and avert an all-out trade war.
While the levy reduction could be claimed in some quarters as a concession to Trump and would be a boon to US automakers such as Tesla Inc and Ford, the move would also end up benefiting European and Asian manufacturers from Daimler AG to Toyota Motor Corp.
Shares of Jaguar Land Rover Automotive PLC owner Tata Motors Ltd and BMW yesterday jumped on the news.
Tata Motors surged as much as 4.7 percent in Mumbai, while BMW rose as much as 1.5 percent in Frankfurt, Germany.
Daimler added as much as 1.3 percent.
Chinese automakers BAIC Motor Corp (北京汽車), BYD Co (比亞迪) and Guangzhou Automobile Group Co (廣州汽車集團) also held to gains as the reduction in the tariff was not as large as it could have been.
Luxury sales leader Audi AG, part of Volkswagen AG, has been making cars in the country since 1996.
General Motors Co’s Cadillac, which has relegated Toyota’s Lexus to fifth in luxury car rankings, opened a factory in Shanghai in 2016.
For Tesla, a tariff cut would provide a boon until the company manages to set up local production.
The Palo Alto, California-based frim has since last year been working with Shanghai’s government to explore assembling cars in China.
Last month’s announcement by Beijing that it would allow foreign new-energy vehicle makers to fully own auto factories as early as this year removed the primary hurdle in the way of Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk.
In particular, high-end automakers would feel the effects of a tariff cut, because less of their production has moved locally.
For example, Lexus would benefit as the only premium Japanese marque that does not manufacture in China or has not announced plans to do so.
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
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