Lithuania yesterday opened a trade office in Taiwan, potentially escalating tensions with China that have been simmering since the EU member state drew a stiff rebuke from Beijing.
The trade office’s opening comes a year after the government in Taipei opened an office in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. China responded by downgrading diplomatic relations with the Baltic state over the office’s explicit use of the name Taiwan.
The new Lithuanian trade office carries the name Taipei, which might avoid a harsher reaction from Beijing.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
“Today we can rejoice over the first achievements of Lithuanian cooperation with Taiwan,” Lithuanian Minister of the Economy and Innovation Ausrine Armonaite said in a statement. “I have no doubt that our work with this promising market will intensify further after the opening of the Lithuanian trade office in Taipei.”
The dispute between China and Lithuania, a Baltic nation of 2.8 million, has helped roil relations between the world’s most populous nation and the EU as a whole.
After Taiwan’s trade office opened, China withdrew its ambassador and faced accusations of halting the clearance of Lithuanian goods in its ports. The standoff prompted the EU to raise the issue of trade hurdles with the WTO.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda last month said China’s punitive action and its backing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed that Beijing is the EU’s “systemic rival.”
Meanwhile, British Minister of State for Trade Policy Greg Hands held talks with Taiwanese officials in Taipei to “future-proof” Britain’s economy in the coming decades, as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s administration looks to take a tougher stance on China.
After exports to China effectively stalled, Lithuania compensated for its losses by increasing its sales to 10 other markets in the Indo-Pacific region by 60 percent in the first eight months of the year, the Lithuanian Ministry of Economy said.
Taiwan yesterday also announced its first 3.5 million euro (US$3.49 million) investment in Lithuania’s ultra-fast laser technology producer Litilit.
Two more investments in Lithuania are to be announced later this year or by early next year to bring the total to 10 million euros, officials in Taipei said.
The Litilit investment was the first made by Taiwan’s US$200 million Central and Eastern Europe Investment fund, set up after Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a de facto embassy on its soil in November last year.
The fund focuses on Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Taiwan, the world's biggest supplier of semiconductors, will invest more than 10 million euros towards chip production in Lithuania, the head of the Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius said yesterday.
The Industrial Technology and Research Institute (工業技術研究院) will cooperate with Lithuania's electronics manufacturer Teltonika to build semiconductor technology capabilities in the Baltic country, Representative to Lithuania Eric Huang (黃鈞耀) said.
Over two dozen Taiwanese scholarships for Lithuanians will be offered for technical training, he added.
"This is not a transaction (in exchange of Lithuania allowing opening of the office)," Huang said. "It is because Taiwan would like to work with Lithuania together to strengthen the resilience of our democratic supply chain in the face of coercion by autocracies."
Earlier this year, Taiwan launched a 200-million-euro equity investment fund and a 1-billion-euro loan facility for Lithuania and other central and eastern European countries.
The first equity investments totaling 10 million euros in Lithuanian would be completed by early next year, said Huang, adding that first loans amounting to 9 million euros should be dispersed by the end of this month.
Taiwan also granted import permits for Lithuanian diary, fish and egg products, and could allow imports of its beef by the end of the year.
Additional reporting by Reuters
RUN IT BACK: A succesful first project working with hyperscalers to design chips encouraged MediaTek to start a second project, aiming to hit stride in 2028 MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it is engaging a second hyperscaler to help design artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators used in data centers following a similar project expected to generate revenue streams soon. The first AI accelerator project is to bring in US$1 billion revenue next year and several billion US dollars more in 2027, MediaTek chief executive officer Rick Tsai (蔡力行) told a virtual investor conference yesterday. The second AI accelerator project is expected to contribute to revenue beginning in 2028, Tsai said. MediaTek yesterday raised its revenue forecast for the global AI accelerator used
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
RSS