Given the stated aim of US President Donald Trump’s administration to maintain the nation’s advantage in manufacturing prowess over China, there are some curious inclusions on its list of new tariffs.
Among them are rare earth metals, an esoteric collection of minerals with high-tech applications and a history of scarcity.
They are used in everything from hybrid vehicles to electronic gadgets and military hardware.
China’s grip on rare earth metal supply is so strong that the US joined with other nations earlier this decade in a WTO case to force Beijing to export more of the materials, not less, after prices spiked amid a global shortage.
The WTO ruled in favor of the US, while prices eventually slumped as manufacturers turned to alternatives.
Imposing duties will “bring home to the American public the reality of how much of what they use in everyday life contains these technology metals,” Jack Lifton, the Michigan-based founder of rare earth consulting service Technology Metals Research LLC, said by telephone.
“The Chinese mine the rare earths, they separate them, they refine them. This is the long-term trend and a 10 percent tariff will not do anything to stir any domestic production in the US,” he said.
In December last year, Trump signed an executive order to reduce the nation’s dependence on external supplies of what the government called critical minerals — including rare earth metals, cobalt and lithium.
That was aimed at reducing US vulnerability to supply disruptions by identifying new sources and streamlining regulations to “expedite production, reprocessing and recycling of minerals,” according to a White House statement.
China produced more than 80 percent of the world’s rare earth metals and compounds last year, according to the US Geological Survey.
It has about 37 percent of global reserves and supplied 78 percent of US imports, it said.
Also in Trump’s sights is cobalt, an increasingly hot commodity that is a vital ingredient in the batteries for electric vehicles.
China is a major refiner of the material, which is also used in so-called super-alloys for jet engines and space vehicles, and a small but not insignificant exporter to the US.
“China produces as much as 80 percent of the world’s refined cobalt, and we’ve just raised our price by 10 percent,” Lifton said.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS