Taiwan’s leading automotive light manufacturer, TYC Brother Industrial Co (堤維西), saw shipments to China grow 30 percent for the first two months of the year in the wake of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), Bill Cho (卓士昭), director-general of the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT), told a media briefing yesterday on the initial results of the ECFA’s early harvest list.
The manufacturer has plans to set up a warehouse in southern China to cope with the expanding shipments of auto lights produced at its Tainan facilities.
TYC is one of the earlier beneficiaries of the ECFA, whose early harvest list took effect on Jan. 1, slashing tariffs on certain Taiwanese goods exported to China.
For the first two months of this year, the export value of Taiwanese goods to China that are on the early harvest list totaled US$2.99 billion — marking a rise of 28.5 percent from last year, he said.
Chinese exports to Taiwan, which also enjoy tariff cuts, expanded 45.2 percent to US$710 million, he added.
Bureau statistics showed that as many as 40 percent of Taiwanese exporters — which filed for the certificates of origin with the bureau in January and last month — had not been actively exporting goods to China over the past three years.
“That means the ECFA has served as a catalyst for Taiwanese exporters to seek business opportunities across the Taiwan Strait,” Cho said.
In spite of the encouraging results, the bureau said there was a growing problem in which some Taiwanese firms, despite making the goods at home, failed to enjoy tariff cuts when shipping them to China because the products were made on order from a third-party country. The ECFA excludes this “merchant trade.” However, the bureau said it would negotiate with China to relax these restrictions.
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