China has signaled it is ready to unleash tariffs as high as 25 percent on imported vehicles with large engines, as trade tensions escalate with the US and EU.
The China Chamber of Commerce to the EU said in a statement on X that it was informed about the potential move by “insiders.”
The levies would affect European and US automakers and have a “significant” impact on relations with the EU, it said.
Photo: AFP
Beijing is ramping up threats of retaliation as a deadline looms for the EU to announce the results of its probe into China’s electric vehicle (EV) subsidies. The bloc must inform Chinese exporters whether it intends to impose tariffs by early next month, and they could go into effect a month later, Eurasia Group has said.
“China’s retaliatory trade investigations and warnings are not deterring the EU,” Eurasia Group analysts wrote in a note on Tuesday. “Brussels is eager to send a strong signal to Beijing with its EV probe that the EU will counteract Chinese subsidies and overcapacity.”
The commerce chamber referred to an interview published by the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper on Tuesday in which Liu Bin (劉斌), chief expert at the China Automotive Technology & Research Center, called for temporarily increasing the tariff rate on vehicles with engines larger than 2.5 liters.
China imported 250,000 vehicles in that bracket last year and WTO rules would permit a tariff of up to 25 percent, the report cited Liu as saying.
The charge on passenger vehicle imports from Europe is currently 15 percent, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce’s tariff search page showed.
The automakers most impacted would be Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Toyota Motor Corp and BMW AG, said Daniel Kollar, head of consultancy Intralink’s automotive and mobility practice.
In addition to the jab at the auto trade, China has hinted it could impose tit-for-tat levies on European wine and dairy products, and has begun an investigation into European exports of brandy.
Amid global concern about China’s surging exports, the EV industry is drawing especially close attention. China produces more EVs than anywhere else, and controls a majority of the battery supply chain.
With a price war and slowing economy at home, its automakers are seeking to expand overseas. They exported 1.55 million EVs last year, about 40 percent of them to Europe.
US President Joe Biden’s administration earlier this month announced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese EVs, while the EU is investigating Beijing’s subsidies across a range of industries, which has prompted Chinese firms to pull out of rail and energy tenders.
“Certain countries and regions have taken restrictive measures in the new-energy vehicle sector, which run counter to the green development concept,” Liu said in the Global Times interview. “Such measures will only hurt the interests of their own consumers.”
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said on Tuesday she was pushing for G7 allies at a finance ministers meeting in Italy to jointly push back on China's industrial policies, although she said she was not asking them to mirror the new US tariffs.
The G7 industrial democracies are the US, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada.
DISAGREEMENT: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has spoken out against the tariffs, as it would affect his country’s auto industry, which benefits from business in China Volvo Car AB has started to shift manufacturing of Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) to Belgium as the EU prepares to impose tariffs on China-made EVs, the Times reported. On top of transferring production of Volvo’s EX30 and EX90 models to Belgium, the automaker might also move assembly of some Volvo models bound for the UK, the report said, citing unidentified people. Volvo, which is owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co (吉利控股集團), is seen as the most exposed among western automakers to the potential tariffs, the Times said. Trade frictions between the EU and China have led to a barrage of anti-dumping probes
European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (ESMC), a subsidiary of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), will hire almost 2,000, from Germany and other European countries, ESMC president Christian Koitzsch said on Monday. At the Taiwan-Europe semiconductor cooperation forum in Berlin, Koitzsch said ESMC would utilize TSMC’s advanced technologies, talent in Europe and good work ethic in Germany to build a world-class talent pool for the semiconductor industry. In August last year, TSMC announced it would team up with Robert Bosch GmbH, Infineon Technologies AG and NXP Semiconductors NV to set up ESMC, in which the Taiwanese partner would hold a
In a middle-class suburb of Mumbai, workers at Softbank Group Corp-backed Swiggy’s grocery warehouse race against time to deliver orders within 10 minutes. Their speed is tracked by the seconds on a screen that flashes red warnings if they are going too slow. Outside in the sweltering heat, Swiggy’s bikers, sporting the firm’s trademark bright orange T-shirt, frantically collect packed grocery orders to deliver them nearby, while others return to tackle another shipment assigned on their app and waiting. “Ideally, one needs to get done with the entire [pickup] process in 1 minute, 30 seconds,” Swiggy warehouse manager Prateek Salunke said. Swiggy warehouses
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to invest billions of dollars over the next 15 years to build data centers in Taiwan and create an infrastructure region in the country by early next year, the Amazon.com Inc cloud computing subsidiary said yesterday. The new “AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region” aims to help customers and AWS partners in Taiwan store their content securely and run cloud-enabled workloads with lower latency from data centers in Taiwan, the company said. The project reflects AWS’ long-term commitment to Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific region amid growing demand for cloud services, it said. The move comes as Taiwan has