NYT Peter Coy: Breaking Up with China Is Hard to Do （Bilingual 雙語）與中國分手很難 Sept. 30, 2024 https://blog.creaders.net/user_blog_diary.php?did=NDk5MTQz Opinion peter coy https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/american-businesses-china.html Breaking Up with China Is Hard to Do Sept. 30, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ET Peter Coy Opinion Writer Credit...Sam Whitney/The New York Times It’s not an easy time to be an American multinational company that sells to or buys from China. As the governments of the United States and China butt heads, they’re pressuring companies to take sides. Look at Ford. In January, the heads of two congressional committees asked the Biden administration to investigate four Chinese companies that they said were involved in Ford’s planned battery factory in Michigan. The committee chairs claimed that the companies had ties to the Chinese military, the Communist Party, the North Korean government and human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region. Or look at Apple. As this newspaper has reported, “For years, Apple has bowed to Beijing’s demands that it block an array of apps, including newspapers, VPNs and encrypted messaging services.” Apple “also built a data center in the country to house Chinese citizens’ iCloud information, which includes personal contacts, photos and email,” The Times wrote. The two companies — which once saw business with China as a major bright spot — are repeatedly forced to scramble to explain. Ford, for example, told Reuters it follows U.S. government regulations “across our business.” Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook talks up the company’s Americanness: “I know that a company like Apple could only come from America — and we are as committed as ever to giving back to our great country,” he said in Arizona in 2022. An analysis released Monday by Strategy Risks, a 12-person business intelligence company focused on relations with China, lists Ford first and Apple third in a ranking of exposure to China among the 250 biggest publicly traded firms in the United States. (Second on the list is Carrier Global, the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning company.) Other analysts might rank the companies lower. You could make a case that Tesla, ranked fourth by Strategy Risks, is more exposed than Ford, Carrier or Apple. But the publication of the list nonetheless invites a look at the China strategies of two of America’s most famous companies. The question that bedevils American C.E.O.s is how close to get to Chinese frenemies: companies that can be both friends as partners and enemies as competitors. The Chinese market is lucrative, but American companies that have entered it have given the Chinese valuable intellectual property — sometimes willingly, sometimes not. As Chinese companies have caught up and in some cases surpassed American companies in technology, the new question for the American ones is whether to attempt to fight their way back to the forefront, at great cost, or cede the market to the Chinese and become their customers.
That’s the dilemma these days for Jim Farley, who has been the chief executive of Ford since 2020. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Farley returned from a China trip in May amazed by Chinese companies’ progress in electric vehicles, telling a fellow Ford board member that “this is an existential threat.” Ford has predicted it will lose around $5 billion on its electric vehicle operations in 2024. That’s in spite of high tariffs that block Chinese E.V.’s from the American market. In August Ford announced it was pulling the plug on an all-electric, three-row sport utility vehicle and delaying the rollout of a large electric pickup truck by about 18 months, to 2027. ith regard to China. Ford is taking subsidies from the U.S. government to make batteries in Michigan. But it’s licensing technology for them from China’s C.A.T.L., the world’s largest maker of E.V. batteries. That amounts to an acknowledgment of Chinese technological leadership, coupled with a commitment to in-house manufacturing. Farley’s latest tactic for keeping up with Chinese competition is setting up a new operation in the Los Angeles area to design electric vehicles that will be entirely new from the pavement up, built around those new batteries. It might work, or it might not. Some Wall Street analysts are skeptical. “Focus on your core,” John Murphy, a Bank of America analyst, said in a talk in June. He said Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, should focus on selling gasoline-powered trucks in North America, which remain highly profitable, while “ultimately investing in autonomous connected and electric vehicles over time.” (Ford says its Chinese operations have turned profitable.) Apple, though still widely admired in China, is losing market share in smartphones and encountering political headwinds. While Apple has tried to remain in the good graces of the government, Chinese agencies and government-backed firms have banned their employees from bringing iPhones and other foreign devices to work. Jon Stewart’s show on Apple’s streaming service ended last year partly because potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives, The Times reported. Apple has made moves to reduce its reliance on Chinese sources for parts but has made little progress. Nikkei Asia reported in April that Apple increased its use of parts from China-headquartered suppliers and Chinese manufacturing sites in 2023, while using fewer suppliers from Taiwan, the United States, Japan and South Korea. Apple said in March that it was expanding a research center in Shanghai and opening a new lab in Shenzhen, the tech hub near Hong Kong. “Everyone has the same dilemma” of fearing over-dependence on China but also worrying about becoming uncompetitive if they pull out, James Andrew Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “People are hedging their bets.” “It would take Apple a decade to get out of China” even if it wanted to, Jeff Fieldhack, a research director for Counterpoint Research, told me. “It’s not just the building of devices. It’s the huge ecosystem of components.” An Apple spokesman declined to discuss the company’s exposure to China. The company says it designs all its products in California and has more than 90,000 employees in the United States, versus about 16,000 in “Greater China,” which for Apple includes Taiwan. If tensions between China and the United States continue to ratchet up, the pressure on companies that straddle the two markets will only intensify. There is no easy way out.
Elsewhere: The Fruits of a High Minimum Wage
California’s $20 minimum wage for workers in big fast-food chains “increased average hourly pay by a remarkable 18 percent, and yet did not reduce employment,” according to a new working paper by the economists Michael Reich of the University of California, Berkeley, and Denis Sosinskiy of the University of California, Davis. The policy increased prices about 3.7 percent, “contrary to industry claims of larger increases,” they estimated. Profit margins of restaurants were above competitive levels before the policy and absorbed “a substantial share” of the increased expense on wages, they calculated. Franchise owners pay a fixed percentage of their revenue in royalties to their parent companies, so when they raised prices, the parent companies got more money that went straight to the bottom line. I asked Michael Strain, an economist who has debated Reich on minimum wages in print, what he thought of the research. He said some of the lowest-skilled workers might be fired and replaced by higher-skilled workers who would be attracted by the higher pay. Also, he said fast-food workers eat at the restaurants where prices rose, so “you’re kind of giving a pay boost to workers with your right hand and you’re taking a bunch of it back with your left hand.”
Quote of the Day “The stock market, which is a sort of horse track without the horses, does not deserve its wide reputation as a barometer. It sometimes sows the hurricane, instead of reporting the breeze.” — E.B. White, “Stock Market Zigzags,” The New Yorker, March 26, 1955, collected in “E.B. White: Writings from The New Yorker 1925-1976” (1990) Peter Coy is a writer for the Opinion section of The Times, covering economics and business. Email him at coy-newsletter@nytimes.com. @petercoy 漢譯 與中國分手很難 https://blog.creaders.net/user_blog_diary.php?did=NDk5MTQz https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/american-businesses-china.html
2024 年 9 月 30 日，美國東部時間下午 3:00
略 圖片來源：Sam Whitney/紐約時報 Peter Coy 觀點作家 對於一家向中國銷售或從中國購買產品的美國跨國公司來說，現在並不是一個容易的時期。隨着美國和中國政府發生衝突，他們正在向企業施壓，要求它們選邊站。 看看福特。今年 1 月，兩個國會委員會的負責人要求拜登政府調查四家中國公司，他們說這些公司參與了福特計劃在密歇根州建立的電池廠。委員會主席聲稱，這些公司與中國軍方、共產黨、朝鮮政府和中國新疆地區的侵犯人權行為有聯繫。 或者看看蘋果。正如本報報道的那樣，“多年來，蘋果一直屈服於北京的要求，屏蔽了包括報紙、VPN 和加密消息服務在內的一系列應用程序。” 《紐約時報》寫道，蘋果“還在中國建立了一個數據中心，用於存儲中國公民的 iCloud 信息，其中包括個人聯繫人、照片和電子郵件”。 這兩家公司曾將與中國的業務視為一大亮點，但現在卻不得不一再爭先恐後地做出解釋。例如，福特告訴路透社，它“在整個業務中”都遵守美國政府的規定。蘋果首席執行官蒂姆·庫克談到了公司的美國特色：“我知道像蘋果這樣的公司只能來自美國——我們一如既往地致力於回饋我們偉大的國家，”他在 2022 年亞利桑那州說道。 Strategy Risks 是一家專注於與中國關係的 12 人商業智能公司，周一發布的一份分析報告將福特列為美國 250 家最大上市公司中對華業務的排名第一，蘋果列為第三。（排名第二的是供暖、通風和空調公司 Carrier Global。）其他分析師可能會將這兩家公司的排名降低。您可能會認為，在戰略風險中排名第四的特斯拉比福特、開利或蘋果的風險更大。但這份名單的公布還是讓人們看到了美國兩家最著名公司的中國戰略。 困擾美國首席執行官的問題是如何接近中國的“亦敵亦友”：既是合作夥伴又是敵人的公司。中國市場利潤豐厚，但進入中國的美國公司已經將寶貴的知識產權交給了中國——有時是自願的，有時不是。 隨着中國公司在技術上趕上並在某些情況下超越美國公司，美國公司面臨的新問題是，是試圖以巨大的代價重新回到前列，還是將市場拱手讓給中國人並成為他們的客戶。 編輯精選
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關於金槍魚的真相 2024 年 9 月 30 日 這就是自 2020 年以來一直擔任福特首席執行官的吉姆·法利 (Jim Farley) 最近面臨的困境。《華爾街日報》本月報道稱，法利 5 月份從中國之行歸來，對中國公司在電動汽車領域的進展感到驚訝，他告訴一位福特董事會成員“這是一個生存威脅”。 福特預測，2024 年其電動汽車業務將虧損約 50 億美元。儘管高額關稅阻止了中國電動汽車進入美國市場。8 月，福特宣布將停止生產全電動三排運動型多用途車，並將大型電動皮卡的推出推遲約 18 個月至 2027 年。 關於中國。福特正在接受美國政府的補貼，在密歇根州生產電池。但他們從中國最大的電動汽車電池製造商寧德時代獲得了技術許可。這相當於承認了中國的技術領先地位，並致力於自主製造。 法利跟上中國競爭的最新策略是在洛杉磯地區設立一個新業務，設計全新的電動汽車，這些汽車將圍繞這些新電池製造。 這可能有效，也可能無效。一些華爾街分析師對此表示懷疑。美國銀行分析師約翰·墨菲 (John Murphy) 在 6 月份的一次談話中表示：“專注於你的核心。”他表示，福特、通用汽車和克萊斯勒的母公司 Stellantis 應該專注於在北美銷售仍然利潤豐厚的汽油動力卡車，同時“最終投資於自動駕駛聯網和電動汽車”。 （福特稱其在華業務已實現盈利。） 儘管蘋果在中國仍廣受推崇，但它在智能手機市場的份額正在下降，並遭遇政治阻力。儘管蘋果試圖保持政府的青睞，但中國機構和政府支持的公司已禁止其員工攜帶 iPhone 和其他的外國設備無法正常工作。據《泰晤士報》報道，喬恩·斯圖爾特關於蘋果流媒體服務的節目去年結束，部分原因是節目中與中國和人工智能相關的潛在話題引起了蘋果高管的擔憂。 蘋果已採取措施減少對中國零部件來源的依賴，但進展甚微。日經亞洲新聞 4 月報道稱，蘋果將在 2023 年增加對總部位於中國的供應商和中國製造基地的零部件的使用，同時減少對台灣、美國、日本和韓國供應商的使用。蘋果在 3 月份表示，正在擴建上海的一個研究中心，並在香港附近的科技中心深圳開設一個新實驗室。 戰略與國際研究中心高級副總裁詹姆斯·安德魯·劉易斯告訴我：“每個人都面臨着同樣的困境”，既擔心過度依賴中國，又擔心退出後會失去競爭力。“人們都在規避風險。” “即使蘋果願意，它也需要十年時間才能走出中國”，Counterpoint Research 研究主管傑夫·菲爾德哈克告訴我。“這不僅僅是設備製造的問題，而是龐大的零部件生態系統。” 蘋果發言人拒絕討論該公司在中國的業務。該公司表示，其所有產品均在加州設計，在美國擁有超過 90,000 名員工，而“大中華區”（對蘋果而言，包括台灣）的員工數量約為 16,000 名。 如果中美之間的緊張局勢繼續加劇，那麼橫跨兩個市場的公司所面臨的壓力只會越來越大。沒有簡單的出路。 其他地方：高最低工資的成果 加州大學伯克利分校經濟學家邁克爾·賴希和加州大學戴維斯分校經濟學家丹尼斯·索辛斯基在新發表的工作論文中指出，加州大型快餐連鎖店員工的最低工資為 20 美元，“平均時薪提高了 18%，但並沒有減少就業”。他們估計，這項政策使價格上漲了約 3.7%，與“行業聲稱的漲幅更大”相反。他們計算出，在政策出台之前，餐館的利潤率高於競爭水平，吸收了工資支出增加的“很大一部分”。特許經營業主向母公司支付固定比例的特許權使用費，因此當他們提高價格時，母公司會獲得更多直接進入底線的資金。 我問過邁克爾·斯特蘭，一位曾在印刷品中與賴希就最低工資問題進行辯論的經濟學家，他對這項研究有何看法。他說，一些技能最低的工人可能會被解僱，取而代之的是那些被高薪吸引的高技能工人。此外，他還表示，快餐工人在價格上漲的餐廳吃飯，所以“你用右手給工人加薪，用左手拿回一大筆錢。” 每日名言 “股市就像沒有馬匹的賽馬場，不配擁有作為晴雨表的廣泛聲譽。它有時會播下颶風，而不是報道微風。” — E.B. White，《股市之字形》，《紐約客》，1955 年 3 月 26 日，收錄於《E.B. White：1925-1976 年《紐約客》作品》（1990 年） Peter Coy 是《紐約時報》觀點版的撰稿人，負責經濟和商業報道。請通過 coy-newsletter@nytimes.com 給他發送電子郵件。 @彼得科伊 | 
