TARIFF CUTS ON imports of some 200 IT products ranging from touch screens to semiconductors took effect on Thursday. The goal is to eliminate them within seven years.
China is one of 50 countries that signed up to a World Trade Organisation Information Technology Agreement last year to promote trade liberalisation of technology goods. China imports an estimated $325 billion worth a year of the components covered by the agreement. Reducing the duty on them will cost an estimated $2.25 billion a year, rising to a potential $8 billion a year with complete elimination.
However, the benefits of cheaper imports for the IT sector are seeing as outweighing these costs. Beijing is undertaking a drive to promote the development of technology-based industries. To this end, it is also raising research and development spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2020 from 2015’s 2.1%, a change that eventually will fatten China’s R&D pot by $50 billion a year.
Intensification of investment into R&D facilities outside China parallels this. So far this year, Chinese companies have announced nine new overseas R&D centres for a total capital expenditure estimated at $224m, according to fDi Markets, a Financial Times division, with pharma and biotech investments particularly prominent. Only Germany and the United States have spent more.
That will support the transformation of the manufacturing economy from low-end exports to self-sustaining indigenous technological innovation, an essential prop for the rebalancing of the economy overall towards being consumption-led.
Winning domestic market share is the aim for now of Chinese firms’ R&D efforts. The success some are having is creating an indigenous innovation culture built around rapid, incremental product development that can take advantage of the economies of scale of the domestic market.
However, Chinese firms are closer than ever to competing with developed-economy companies in R&D. Products they are now selling in Africa and Asia, as well as at home, are starting to show the results of that, a harbinger of what will eventually come to developed markets, too.
China Bystander 