Britain and South Korea were yesterday to sign an agreement to reinforce supply lines for key products like semiconductors damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, with British Secretary of State for International Trade Anne-Marie Trevelyan due to host her counterpart, Yeo Han-koo, in London.
The ministers were also to begin work on an improved trade deal, as Britain looks to use its exit from the EU to build stronger ties with faster-growing economies throughout Asia and the Pacific.
“This is our Indo-Pacific tilt in action — strengthening ties with one of the largest economies in the world,” Trevelyan said in a statement.
Photo: Reuters
Yesterday’s meeting is a precursor to formal trade negotiations, which are expected to begin later this year, to improve an existing agreement that effectively keeps in place the terms Britain had as a member of the EU.
Ahead of that, the delegations in London are looking to improve supply chain resilience in the face of global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is driving up production costs and fueling inflation — currently at its highest in nearly 30 years in Britain.
Details of the agreement were not published in advance.
Britain said it wanted to ensure critical goods kept flowing between the two countries, citing chips used in advanced manufacturing as an example.
The British auto industry, like others around the world, has been held back by a global shortage of semiconductors.
World leaders last year sought ways to strengthen supply chains by improving transparency and diversifying sources of key products.
Trade between Britain and South Korea was worth ￡13.3 billion (US$18 billion) in the year to September last year, the government said. Both countries are seeking to join a trans-Pacific trade pact.
Leaving the EU has given Britain the power to strike bilateral trade deals, and ministers see South Korea and its wealthy middle class as an important potential market for premium British goods, from folding bikes to pottery and Scotch whisky.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS