Kathrin Hille of the Financial Times reports that Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te vowed to boost U.S. investment and purchases to address the trade deficit. He defended Taiwan’s semiconductor industry amid Trump’s tariff threats and pressure to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S. Hille writes:
Taiwan’s president has pledged to boost procurement and investment in the US as he rushes to respond to Donald Trump’s global tariff threats and pressure on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.
“We will increase investment in the US and purchases from it to balance bilateral trade,” Lai Ching-te told reporters on Friday, just hours after the US president announced plans to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on countries with which the US runs large trade deficits.
The US trade deficit with Taiwan, its seventh-largest trading partner, widened by $26.1bn to $73.9bn last year, driven by booming demand for cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips. […]
Lai pledged to raise Taiwan’s defence spending from 2.5 per cent of GDP to more than 3 per cent, in another effort to gain goodwill in Washington.
He also said that Taipei was the US’s “most reliable trading partner”, but added the Trump administration was pursuing “strategies and policies that are completely different from the past”, which posed challenges for all other countries, including Taiwan.
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