China yesterday launched a probe into whether Australian barley suppliers dumped cheap imports into their biggest market over the past year, catching the grain trade on the hop just as drought shrivels Australian crops and drives prices higher.
Coming amid strained diplomatic ties between Beijing and Canberra, the move by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce came after the China Chamber of International Commerce complained that Australian barley was sold at lower-than-normal prices for the 12 months through September, hurting domestic suppliers.
Australia is by far China’s top supplier of barley, used both in brewing and livestock feed.
It exported 6.48 million tonnes last year, close to three-quarters of China’s about 8.86 million tonnes of imports of the grain, worth about US$1.5 billion, according to Chinese customs.
The timing of the move left grain analysts and traders scratching their heads for an explanation, with some among the latter suggesting it might be politically motivated: Australian barley has become expensive as supplies have dwindled amid extreme drought.
“It’s a bit odd to take this moment to ask the [Chinese] state to put safeguard measures in place,” said Even Rogers Pay, an agriculture analyst at China Policy, a Beijing-based consultancy.
The probe follows a period of tense relations between Australia and China. Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull accused Beijing of interfering in its domestic affairs while in office, and the two countries have been jostling for influence in Pacific island countries that control swathes of resource-rich ocean.
The probe is to end within one year, with an option for an additional six months of investigation.
The commerce chamber said in its request for an investigation that the volume of barley imports from Australia jumped 67 percent from 2014 to last year, while prices slipped to US$198.05 per tonne, nearly a third below their 2014 level.
The ministry would also look into whether domestic suppliers’ business was damaged in the period from Jan. 1, 2014, until Sept. 30.
China last year produced 1.66 million tonnes of barley, according to the commerce chamber, down from 1.81 million tonnes in 2014.
High prices have curbed demand from China’s animal feed makers.
Australian barley costs about US$275 per tonne including freight, about the same price as Chinese corn.
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