Vietnamese and US companies have signed more than US$4 billion in deals, a petrochemical giant said yesterday, as anxiety mounts in Hanoi over potential tariffs under the administration of US President Donald Trump.
The Southeast Asian nation has the third-biggest trade surplus with the US, after China and Mexico — both targeted by Trump since he took office.
A statement posted by PetroVietnam Power Corp (PVPower) on its Web site said the new projects — in areas such as aviation, oil and gas exploration, and petrochemical imports — were worth about US$4.15 billion.
Photo: Reuters
The “highly meaningful” deals were aimed at establishing “balanced and harmonious” trade, and would create hundreds of thousands of jobs for workers in the two nations, PVPower said.
They were signed in the US on Thursday during a visit by Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade Nguyen Hong Dien to meet US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Washington.
Greer told Dien that Vietnam “needs to have stronger solutions to open the market and improve the trade balance,” according to a report on the Web site of the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Trade.
There is increasing worry in Hanoi that Vietnam could be the next target of Trump’s tariffs, which have sent shock waves through global markets.
Earlier, Hanoi said it was reviewing import duties on goods from the US. Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh told US Ambassador Marc Knapper that the review would look to encourage increased imports of liquified natural gas, as well as agricultural and high-tech products, a report on the government’s Web site said on Thursday.
Chinh told Knapper that Vietnam was “actively addressing the current concerns of the US in economic-trade-investment relations.”
Vietnam was also “reviewing import tariffs on goods from the United States, encouraging increased imports of key US products that Vietnam needs, especially agricultural products, liquefied gas and high-tech products,” the report said.
The US trade deficit in goods with Vietnam was US$123.5 billion last year, up more than 18 percent on 2023, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
MORTGAGE WORRIES: About 34% of respondents to a survey said they would approach multiple lenders to pay for a home, while 29.2% said they would ask family for help New housing projects in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu city and county, are projected to total NT$710.65 billion (US$23.61 billion) in the upcoming fall sales season, a record 30 percent decrease from a year earlier, as tighter mortgage rules prompt developers to pull back, property listing platform 591.com (591新建案) said yesterday. The number of projects has also fallen to 312, a more than 20 percent decrease year-on-year, underscoring weakening sentiment and momentum amid lingering policy and financing headwinds. New Taipei City and Taoyuan bucked the downturn in project value, while Taipei, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung
RSS