General Motors Co (GM) on Friday said that expansive US tariffs on imported vehicles being considered by US President Donald Trump’s administration could lead to “a smaller GM” and risks isolating US businesses from the global market.
The Trump administration in May launched an investigation into whether imported vehicles posed a national security threat.
On Friday, Trump said the investigation would be completed in three to four weeks.
Photo: AP
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled from Washington to New Jersey, Trump also said the US has been treated very badly by the WTO, but he is not considering withdrawing from it at this point.
Asked when the probe would be concluded, he said: “Very soon. It’ll be done in three, four weeks.”
By law, the US Department of Commerce has 270 days to offer recommendations to the US president after a Section 232 probe starts. The president then has 90 days to act upon those recommendations.
Written comments from interested parties in the probe were due on Friday, and the Trump administration has scheduled a public hearing for July 19 and July 20.
The largest US automaker said in comments filed on Friday with the department that overly broad tariffs could “lead to a smaller GM, a reduced presence at home and abroad for this iconic American company, and risk less — not more — US jobs.”
The tariffs could hike vehicle prices and reduce sales, GM said.
Even if automakers opted not to pass on higher costs “this could still lead to less investment, fewer jobs and lower wages for our employees. The carry-on effect of less investment and a smaller workforce could delay breakthrough technologies.”
Toyota Motor Corp on Friday also filed separate comments opposing the tariffs saying they would “threaten US manufacturing, jobs, exports and economic prosperity.”
The company said that Trump has repeatedly praised the automaker for investing in the US, including a new US$1.3 billion joint venture assembly plant in Alabama with Mazda Motor Corp.
“These investments reflect our confidence in the US economy and in the power of the administration’s tax cuts,” Toyota said in its submission.
Toyota said that international automakers assembling vehicles in the US are based in countries, including Japan, German and South Korea, “that are America’s closest allies.”
It “is difficult to foresee a situation in which any of them would engage in an armed conflict with the US or cut off supplies of defense materials, and if they did, the United States would have an easy recourse of simply seizing their US plants,” it said.
On Thursday, Toyota North America chief Jim Lentz was in Washington holding meetings with lawmakers on trade issues.
On Wednesday, two major auto trade groups said imposing up to 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles would cost hundreds of thousands of auto jobs, dramatically hike prices on vehicles and threaten industry spending on self-driving cars.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to