Some of the steep US tariff increases on an array of Chinese imports, including electric vehicles (EVs) and their batteries, computer chips and medical products, would take effect on Aug. 1, the US Trade Representative’s office said yesterday.
US President Joe Biden would keep tariffs put in place by former US president Donald Trump while ratcheting up others, including a quadrupling of import duties on Chinese EVs to more than 100 percent and a doubling of semiconductor duties to 50 percent.
The trade agency said in a federal notice that a 30-day public comment period would close on June 28.
A container ship is berthed at the Pacific International Container Terminal of the Port of Tianjin in China on Wednesday last week.
It is seeking comments on the effects of the proposed tariff increase on the US economy, including consumers, and on whether a proposed 25 percent duty on medical masks, gloves and syringes should be higher.
The notice also provides specific tariff codes for 387 product categories affected, along with new duty rates and implementation dates.
Tariffs starting next year and in 2026 would start on Jan. 1 for those years, the trade agency said.
The proposed Chinese tariff increases include “products targeted by China for dominance, or are products in sectors where the United States has recently made significant investments,” it said.
Washington is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy tax subsidies to develop EV, solar and other new industries, and has said that China’s state-driven excess production capacity in these sectors threatens the viability of US firms.
The tariffs are meant to protect US jobs from a feared flood of cheap Chinese imports.
The new measures would affect US$18 billion in imported Chinese goods, including steel and aluminum, semiconductors, EVs, critical minerals, solar cells and cranes, the White House said.
The EV figure might have more of a political than a practical impact in the US, which imports few Chinese EVs because of prior vehicle tariffs.
The largest two categories, making up US$13.2 billion of the targeted imports from China last year, are lithium-ion batteries, US Census Bureau trade data showed.
Duties of 25 percent are due to start in 2026 on the US$10.9 billion non-vehicle lithium-ion battery category, which has grown quickly and is the third-largest US import category from China after smartphones and personal computers.
The US imported US$427 billion in goods from China last year and exported US$148 billion to the world’s No. 2 economy, a trade gap that has persisted for decades and become an ever more sensitive subject in Washington.
US Trade Representative Katherine Tai (戴琪) has said the revised tariffs were justified because China was stealing US intellectual property.
Tai has also recommended tariff exclusions for hundreds of industrial machinery import categories from China, including solar product manufacturing equipment.
China has denounced the tariff hikes and vowed “resolute measures” to protect its interests.
On Sunday, Beijing announced a new anti-dumping probe on certain industrial plastics from Taiwan, the US, Europe and Japan.
The trade agency said it would provide details on how companies could apply for machinery exclusions from the tariffs in a separate notice.
However, it said that any exclusions granted would be backdated to start yesterday and end on May 31 next year.
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
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
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
LAGGING: The chasm between the two firms’ share prices shows the challenges facing China’s largest chip investment fund, which is focused on growing the local sector The share price gap between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and China’s biggest chipmaker is almost at its widest in nearly two decades, highlighting the difficulty Beijing faces in building up its domestic chip industry. Bolstered partly by state-of-the-art chipmaking capabilities, TSMC has soared 48 percent this year in Taipei while Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際) lost 7.5 percent, leaving the gap between the two stocks’ annual performance poised to be the biggest since 2005. The chasm has occurred even as China’s largest semiconductor investment fund, known as Big Fund III, aims to develop the local sector amid US