China has launched a raft of new questionnaires for US semiconductor businesses in an effort to discover data on the companies' activities in China, and particularly how their prices, income, and profits differ between native US sales and those in Asian territories, like China, via Bloomberg. Although no companies have been named specifically, the wording in the survey seems set to target major US semiconductor producers like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices.
This may also just be one more salvo in the asymmetric trade war that's ongoing between the US and China ahead of proposed talks between the two countries' leaders later this month.
The questionnaire was published by China’s Trade Remedy and Investigation Bureau under the Ministry of Commerce and is said to be part of an anti-dumping investigation. It asks for the names of Chinese customers and transaction details with those organizations, including sales volume and the costs of logistics, as well as warehouse storage and transport costs. It also asks for details on raw material suppliers.
The questionnaire gives companies 37 days to respond, but with no specific companies named, it's not clear who is being targeted. Because of that, most analysts believe this to be yet another move by China to build strength ahead of planned trade negotiations. It could also be a maneuver to gain greater control of American companies operating within the Chinese market, and could be designed to help curb exports from China.
China recently blocked exports from the Chinese branch of Dutch chip firm Nexperia due to ongoing scuffles over company ownership and Chinese influence. China has also announced anti-monopoly investigations into both Nvidia and Qualcomm, citing historic acquisitions as potentially problematic from China's perspective.
Although the US has cut off China's access to some high-end AI hardware and graphics processors in recent months, the battle over semiconductor supplies is now extending to more analog and older chip designs. Alongside a rush to develop powerful AI models and to build out the infrastructure required to run them, the US and China are pushing towards a multi-polar world of silicon supply chains.
As Bloomberg highlights, although some of these chips aren't cutting-edge designs, they are still intrinsically important to a range of modern devices and other components. Analog chips can handle tasks like amplifying wireless signals and regulating voltages in electrical circuits. That makes them an essential component in the global supply of semiconductors, and another theater in the ongoing silicon trade wars.
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