Japanese officials yesterday said that they are pursuing procedures to downgrade South Korea’s preferred nation status as Tokyo expands export controls over sensitive materials.
The Japanese Cabinet is set to approve as early as Aug. 2 a plan to drop South Korea from a list of 27 countries granted preferential trade status, Japanese media reported.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga did not confirm the date, but said that Japan is going ahead as planned.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The delisting would take effect three weeks after the Cabinet’s approval. That would be on about Aug. 23.
“As we have been saying all along, a planned removal of South Korea’s ‘white nation’ status is an appropriate measure in order for Japan to effectively carry out export controls,” Suga said.
On July 4, Japan began requiring case-by-case export licenses for exports to South Korea of three materials used in high-tech devices.
Tokyo also announced plans to drop South Korea from its list of countries allowed preferential trade status, pending “public comments” and Cabinet approval.
Officials are studying opinions sent to the government during the “public comment” period that ended on Wednesday, a required step that is largely a formality.
More than 10,000 opinions were submitted, including one from the South Korean government defending its export controls, Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry officials said.
The majority of the senders supported stripping South Korea of preferential status, the officials said.
South Korea has objected to Japan’s tightening of the export policy, alleging that Tokyo is using trade issues as a weapon to retaliate over court procedures demanding Japanese companies pay compensation to south Korean victims of harsh wartime labor.
South Korea also says the curbs are unnecessary, one-sided and harmful to free trade.
The trade flap is an extra irritant in the troubled relationship between the two neighbors, which has long been strained by antagonism left over from Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula in 1910-1945.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by