Missing the boat again

As soon as it was certain that Trump had won the elections, business news media started publishing a lot of stories about worried investors in China-based manufacturing facilities as well as US marketing companies dependent on their China supply chain.

- BOO CHANCO

Trump has announced he will impose a tariff of 60 percent or more on Chinese products entering the US as soon as he takes office.

Actually, tariffs on Chinese exports to the US have been increased over the past years under the Biden administration. Channel News Asia reported that last May, the US said it would increase tariffs on Chinese semiconductors from 25 percent to 50 percent by 2025. This was among a slew of US tariff hikes meant to protect domestic industries. Other tariffs—including a 100 percent duty on Chinese electric vehicles, 50 percent on solar cells and 25 percent on steel, aluminum, EV batteries and key minerals—went into effect on Sept. 27.

The US has long accused China of unfair trade practices. The US imported $427 billion in goods from China in 2023 and exported $148 billion to the world's second largest economy, a trade gap that has persisted for decades.

The Conference Board, a research organization, released a survey in June that revealed more than half of China-based CEOs, mostly from US and European multinational companies, expect investments or operations to shift away from China to India in the next two years.

The New York Times reported that a company selling shoes in the US got their agent in China on the phone at 4:30 a.m. Beijing time and pressed him to ask their factory how many more pairs of men's dress shoes they could make before Chinese New Year, at the end of January. "I told them if they could make an additional 30,000 pairs, we would take that," the co-owner of a shoe company called Deer Stags said on Thursday following Trump's election.