US President Donald Trump on Friday said he has spoken with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and that they are working on an agreement so Australia will not be subject to US tariffs on steel and aluminum.
Trump on Thursday set import tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, but he exempted Canada and Mexico and held out the possibility of excluding other allies.
“He is committed to having a very fair and reciprocal military and trade relationship,” Trump said on Twitter, referring to Turnbull. “Working very quickly on a security agreement so we don’t have to impose steel or aluminum tariffs on our ally, the great nation of Australia.”
Australia is a small global exporter of steel, despite being one of the world’s largest suppliers of raw iron ore.
Australian steel and aluminum exports to the US were worth just more than A$400 million (US$314.1 million) last year, Australian government data showed.
Shortly after Trump’s tweet, Turnbull said on Twitter that the relationship between the two allies was fair and reciprocal.
“Thank you for confirming new tariffs won’t have to be imposed on Australian steel & aluminum — good for jobs in Australia and in US!” Turnbull said.
Separately, the EU and Japan were yesterday in talks with Trump’s trade envoy looking to be excluded from US steel and aluminum tariffs, with the EU warning that it would retaliate if Washington does not relent.
The EU on Friday said that it remained unclear how an exclusion would work and that it wanted details from yesterday’s talks with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Brussels, but added that it did not expect the meeting to resolve all the problems.
“We need a dialogue with the United States. It’s clear. We need clarity,” European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen said.
“We are an ally, not a threat,” he said, rejecting any hint that the bloc’s exports threatened US national security — Trump’s justification for imposing the tariffs.
Lighthizer’s meetings with European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmstrom and separately with Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Hiroshige Seko were long planned, but they took on added urgency as allies warned the US moves could provoke a global trade war.
The European Commission, which coordinates trade policy for the 28-nation EU, the world’s biggest trading bloc, has said it is ready to impose safeguards, tariffs or quotas to protect its own steel and aluminum industries from products diverted to Europe because of the US measures.
It has already started monitoring incoming metal flows to see whether a surge occurs.
The EU is also maintaining a threat of countermeasures that would target US imports ranging from corn to motorcycles, and might publish its list next week to allow industry and other interested parties to give their input.
Under WTO rules, such countermeasures have to be in place within 90 days of the US tariffs entering force.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
RSS