Tech Cold War is on a doorway?
China strikes back to the US with an unreliable entities list. Trade war continues
Why can’t fuckers just unite and produce good tech together? There are many reasons, but the thrust for power and domination is the main one. China is more than happy to own almost a fifth of the U.S. debt owned by foreigners. Owning U.S. Treasury notes helps China’s economy grow. It keeps the yuan weak relative to the dollar. As a result, Chinese exports are less expensive than U.S. products. So the American side sees a solution, extends taxes, make Chinese business in the US impossible. That way the cocksucking economists believe that America will make better products of their own, without Chinese cheap labor power.
But China nowadays has not only labor to offer. It’s a great market space for US companies. Apple is heavily invested in China (Apple earned $10.2 billion in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, or about 18 percent of its total revenue), which is both a major manufacturer of the iPhone and a major market for it.
Tesla is building a plant in Shanghai that will produce 250,000 cars a year. Venture capitalists have poured in funding. Microsoft’s research lab in Beijing is its largest outside the United States, while many of the products in the Amazon shopping mall are made in the country. Amazon also just opened an A.I. lab in China.
The consequences of the deteriorating relationship are already playing out with smaller tech companies.
After Trump administration put Huawei on an “entity list” that would force it to get permission to buy technology from American companies. Huawei relies on American-made parts for everything from its smartphones to its networking equipment. Although it received a 90-day waiver to allow time for negotiations, many companies based in the United States have already severed ties.
That has had a hard shit-storm effect. Lumentum, a Silicon Valley company that makes optical networking gear, said Huawei was generating about 15 percent of its revenue. Last week, it reduced its expectations for the current quarter by about $35 million to a maximum of $390 million.
Qorvo, a semiconductor company in North Carolina, also said last week that it depended on Huawei for about 15 percent of its sales and projected that its revenue in the current quarter would drop by about $50 million to a maximum of $750 million.
China is a big and fast-growing consumer of computer chips, used in an array of products that include smartphones, personal computers, communications equipment and server systems. Customers in the country accounted for about 34 percent of global sales in 2018, which totaled $468.8 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
“If China continues to push back, and we continue to push back, there will soon be dual technology standards,” said Rebecca Fannin, author of the coming book “Tech Titans of China.” “Prices will probably rise for components, which companies will pass along to consumers. But both sides will strengthen their innovation edge, and that helps the global economy.”