Hi there. It’s Brady again.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard about the “tech decoupling” between the United States and China. For a moment, a change in administrations in Washington seemed to put the process on hold, but it was still brewing.
Twelve Chinese firms were added to the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List last week. At least seven are partially state-owned or affiliated with state-backed funds.
In a situation where geopolitical goals mingle with (or run counter to) business interests, it’s difficult to say whether the Entity List is effective, or in what way political leaders may use it to achieve their goals. One of the firms on the trade blacklist is SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker. The company managed to log record-high revenue in Q3 2021.
But Huawei, which is also blacklisted, didn’t share the same fortune. It has spun off business units and licensed its designs to third parties to bypass sanctions. The result? A 32% drop in revenues in the first nine months of this year.
There are more nuances to these two examples, like the radioactivity of doing business with Huawei and the national goal to develop domestically designed and manufactured semiconductors. If you have insights about the broader situation, I’d love to hear from you.
Jiaxing wrote about the latest development. You can read the article here.
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