Taiwanese companies are cutting their exposure to China just as they ramp up investment in other parts of the world in the latest sign of how growing tensions between the US and China are reshaping global supply chains.
New investments in China by Taiwanese companies declined 10.4 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of the year to US$758 million, data released by the Investment Commission yesterday showed.
That follows an almost 14 percent decrease in such investment last year.
Photo: Bloomberg
Taiwanese companies, traditionally among the biggest investors in China, have been reducing new capital expenditure in the world’s second-largest economy over the past decade. The slowdown has accelerated since former US president Donald Trump began pushing US companies to decouple from China, a policy largely continued by the administration of US President Joe Biden.
In addition to the slowdown in new money, Taiwanese firms pulled a record amount of profit out of China last year, Chinese-language media reported.
Taiwanese-listed companies repatriated NT$114 billion (US$3.72 billion) of investment income from China last year, the Financial Supervisory Commission said in a statement on Tuesday.
The paring back of cross-strait investment comes as China has ratcheted up the political, military and economic pressure on Taiwan since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
China responded to Tsai’s stopover in California early this month — during which she met with US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy — with military drills around Taiwan.
Beijing officials have been keen to reverse the trend of Taiwanese firms exiting China.
Wang Huning (王滬寧), the No. 4 official in the Chinese Communist Party, promised greater efforts to persuade Taiwanese businesses to invest in China and to help them integrate into the Chinese economy.
Slowing investment in China stands in contrast to a rapid increase in Taiwanese investment elsewhere.
Total Taiwanese overseas investment, excluding China, surged 240 percent to US$6.9 billion in the first quarter, the Investment Commission data showed, with half of that due to a US$3.5 billion investment by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) in a plant in Arizona.
Investment in Southeast Asia also almost doubled as companies seek alternative production bases outside China.
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