Japan incentivizing its companies to shift manufacturing facilities out of China and adding Bangladesh to a list of preferred destinations for relocating the factories might give the nation’s economy a boost.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic started in China, Japanese companies needed to diversify” their supply chains further, Japanese Ambassador to Bangladesh Naoki Ito said in an interview. “This will provide an opportunity for Bangladesh.”
Japan’s nudge to relocate companies comes at a time when a special economic zone (SEZ) is being developed in Bangladesh to attract Japanese firms’ production facilities.
The industrial zone sprawling on 405 hectares in the Araihazar sub-district, 32km from the capital Dhaka, is expected to bring in US$20 billion in Japanese investment, the Bangladesh Economic Zones Authority said.
For years, Japanese manufacturers have sought lower labor costs and supply-chain diversification by moving some output out of China, as wages rose and infrastructure in countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh improved.
Over the past 10 years, the number of Japanese companies operating in Bangladesh has tripled to about 300, Ito said.
Japan has allocated US$350 million in special loans to set up the US$1 billion industrial zone, making it the largest such assistance for an SEZ in Asia, Ito added.
The Araihazar Industrial Park, which is to be operational by next year, is seeking to draw new investments from automakers, such as Suzuki Motor Corp and Mitsubishi Corp, Ito said.
Japan Tobacco Inc and Honda Motor Co are so far among the largest Japanese investors in Bangladesh.
The nation occupies a geographically strategic location linking South Asia and Southeast Asia, and Japan is planning a 177.77 billion taka (US$2.1 billion) deep-sea port on Matarbari Island.
One of the world’s most populous countries, Bangladesh has 160 million people residing in a land area that is about 40 percent of Japan.
Bangladesh’s economy, which grew an estimated 5.2 percent in the year ended in June last year, is expected to expand 7.4 percent in the current financial year.
While that is slower than the 8.2 percent pace previously forecast, it still puts the nation ahead of regional peers on the growth metric.
The country nestled between India and the Bay of Bengal is a destination with “good and strong” prospects for Japanese companies, Ito said.
“The pace of recovery is faster in Bangladesh, compared with neighboring countries,” Ito added.
NXP Semiconductors NV expects its first automotive-grade 5-nanometer chip built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to become available for automakers within one-and-a-half years at the earliest, following demand for better computing performance and energy efficiency for connected vehicles, a company executive said yesterday. That would mean a significant upgrade from the 16-nanometer technology NXP adopted in its existing series of microprocessors. NXP chief technology executive Lars Reger made the remarks during a media briefing yesterday in Taipei. The latest updates came after NXP unveiled its plan to source 5-nanometer capacity from TSMC in 2021. This is Reger’s first trip to
AI TREND: TSMC has been rapidly expanding capacity to meet a spike in demand for advanced packaging services, but still expects supplies to be tight for 18 months Arizona is in talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) about advanced chip packaging, state Governor Katie Hobbs said yesterday, which is crucial for the manufacturing of artificial intelligence (AI) chips. TSMC, which is building a US$40 billion chip factory in the US state, has not announced plans to build facilities for advanced chip packaging in the US. Advanced packaging processes stitch multiple chips together into a single device, lowering the added cost of more powerful computing. “Part of our efforts at building the semiconductor ecosystem is focusing on advanced packaging, so we have several things in the works around that
The European Commission’s digital chief yesterday said that murky Chinese laws were fueling concerns among foreign firms in the country, following discussions with Beijing officials about critical areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data governance. Vera Jourova, who is also the commission’s vice president, made the comments after meeting on Monday with Chinese counterparts including Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing (張國清) in the second “High-level Digital Dialogue” between the two sides. Among the concerns Jourova said she had heard about from European businesses in China was the “unpredictability of the decisions and interpretation of the laws by the regulators.” Beijing has recently implemented
EVADING US CONTROLS? ‘These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors,’ a source said about HiSilicon’s components A Huawei Technologies Co (華為) unit is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras in a fresh sign that the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of US export controls, two sources briefed on the unit’s efforts said. The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company’s chip design unit, HiSilicon Technologies Co (海思半導體), started this year, said one of the sources and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said that at least some of the customers were Chinese. Huawei unveiled new smartphones in the past few weeks that