China has lifted its punitive tariffs on Australia’s wine exports, signaling an end to a three-year campaign of trade pressure on Canberra and raising hopes for a revival of the billion-dollar industry.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced the move yesterday. The industry has been anticipating the announcement for weeks after some Australian vintners and lawmakers said the Asian nation had made an interim recommendation to lift the import taxes.
“In view of the changes in the relevant wine market conditions in China, it is no longer necessary to impose anti-dumping duties and countervailing duties on imported relevant wines originating in Australia,” the ministry said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
The decision to remove trade curbs has raised hopes of reviving the lucrative wine trade between the two nations, but Australia China Business Council national president David Olsson on Wednesday said that winemakers might not make a full return to the market.
“We expect to see a significant proportion of the wine coming back into China, but not all of it. A lot of it is just looking to other markets,” Olsson told Bloomberg Television.
China imposed tariffs of up to 218 percent on Australian wine in March 2021, after then-Australian prime minister Scott Morrison called for an international probe into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision has contributed to a glut that has brought the wine industry to its knees.
China was Australia’s top wine export destination in 2019, accounting for A$1.1 billion (US$714 million).
Relations between the two nations started improving after the May 2022 election of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, culminating in his visit to Beijing in November last year.
Trade curbs on some other Australian commodities have already been withdrawn. China now accounts for about 90 percent of the nation’s barley exports after tariffs were scrapped in August last year.
Australian businesses are looking forward to China removing restrictions on eight Australian abattoirs and the import of live lobsters, China-Australia Chamber of Commerce chairman Vaughn Barber said last week.
China has not officially acknowledged its restrictions on lobsters from Australia.
Separately, Australia is to invest A$1 billion to ensure more solar panels are made domestically, as the nation looks to reduce its dependence on imports from China.
The Solar Sunshot program is to offer production subsidies and grants to help Australia capture more of the global solar manufacturing supply chain, the government said in a statement.
While Australia has the highest uptake of rooftop solar in the world — with panels on one in three households — just 1 percent of those have been made locally, it said.
China provides more than 90 percent of Australia’s panels.
“Australia should not be the last link in a global supply chain built on an Australian invention,” Albanese said in the statement, referring to pioneering work on the technology at the University of New South Wales.
“We have every metal and critical mineral necessary to be a central player in the net zero transformation, and a proven track record as a reliable energy producer and exporter,” he said.
Global solar supply is facing a crisis after the rapid expansion of plants outpaced demand and squeezed margins, Bloomberg NEF said in a report this month.
About US$78 billion of surplus solar manufacturing capacity could be added through 2027, it said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”