Breaking Up with China Is Hard to Do 双语 与中国分手很难
NYT Peter Coy: Breaking Up with China Is Hard to Do （Bilingual 双语）与中国分手很难 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
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
汉译
与中国分手很难
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，美国东部时间下午 3:00
略
图片来源：Sam Whitney/纽约时报
Peter Coy
观点作家
对于一家向中国销售或从中国购买产品的美国跨国公司来说，现在并不是一个容易的时期。随着美国和中国政府发生冲突，他们正在向企业施压，要求它们选边站。
看看福特。今年 1 月，两个国会委员会的负责人要求拜登政府调查四家中国公司，他们说这些公司参与了福特计划在密歇根州建立的电池厂。委员会主席声称，这些公司与中国军方、共产党、朝鲜政府和中国新疆地区的侵犯人权行为有联系。
或者看看苹果。正如本报报道的那样，“多年来，苹果一直屈服于北京的要求，屏蔽了包括报纸、VPN 和加密消息服务在内的一系列应用程序。” 《纽约时报》写道，苹果“还在中国建立了一个数据中心，用于存储中国公民的 iCloud 信息，其中包括个人联系人、照片和电子邮件”。
这两家公司曾将与中国的业务视为一大亮点，但现在却不得不一再争先恐后地做出解释。例如，福特告诉路透社，它“在整个业务中”都遵守美国政府的规定。苹果首席执行官蒂姆·库克谈到了公司的美国特色：“我知道像苹果这样的公司只能来自美国——我们一如既往地致力于回馈我们伟大的国家，”他在 2022 年亚利桑那州说道。
Strategy Risks 是一家专注于与中国关系的 12 人商业智能公司，周一发布的一份分析报告将福特列为美国 250 家最大上市公司中对华业务的排名第一，苹果列为第三。（排名第二的是供暖、通风和空调公司 Carrier Global。）其他分析师可能会将这两家公司的排名降低。您可能会认为，在战略风险中排名第四的特斯拉比福特、开利或苹果的风险更大。但这份名单的公布还是让人们看到了美国两家最著名公司的中国战略。
困扰美国首席执行官的问题是如何接近中国的“亦敌亦友”：既是合作伙伴又是敌人的公司。中国市场利润丰厚，但进入中国的美国公司已经将宝贵的知识产权交给了中国——有时是自愿的，有时不是。
随着中国公司在技术上赶上并在某些情况下超越美国公司，美国公司面临的新问题是，是试图以巨大的代价重新回到前列，还是将市场拱手让给中国人并成为他们的客户。
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这就是自 2020 年以来一直担任福特首席执行官的吉姆·法利 (Jim Farley) 最近面临的困境。《华尔街日报》本月报道称，法利 5 月份从中国之行归来，对中国公司在电动汽车领域的进展感到惊讶，他告诉一位福特董事会成员“这是一个生存威胁”。
福特预测，2024 年其电动汽车业务将亏损约 50 亿美元。尽管高额关税阻止了中国电动汽车进入美国市场。8 月，福特宣布将停止生产全电动三排运动型多用途车，并将大型电动皮卡的推出推迟约 18 个月至 2027 年。
关于中国。福特正在接受美国政府的补贴，在密歇根州生产电池。但他们从中国最大的电动汽车电池制造商宁德时代获得了技术许可。这相当于承认了中国的技术领先地位，并致力于自主制造。
法利跟上中国竞争的最新策略是在洛杉矶地区设立一个新业务，设计全新的电动汽车，这些汽车将围绕这些新电池制造。
这可能有效，也可能无效。一些华尔街分析师对此表示怀疑。美国银行分析师约翰·墨菲 (John Murphy) 在 6 月份的一次谈话中表示：“专注于你的核心。”他表示，福特、通用汽车和克莱斯勒的母公司 Stellantis 应该专注于在北美销售仍然利润丰厚的汽油动力卡车，同时“最终投资于自动驾驶联网和电动汽车”。 （福特称其在华业务已实现盈利。）
尽管苹果在中国仍广受推崇，但它在智能手机市场的份额正在下降，并遭遇政治阻力。尽管苹果试图保持政府的青睐，但中国机构和政府支持的公司已禁止其员工携带 iPhone 和其他的外国设备无法正常工作。据《泰晤士报》报道，乔恩·斯图尔特关于苹果流媒体服务的节目去年结束，部分原因是节目中与中国和人工智能相关的潜在话题引起了苹果高管的担忧。
苹果已采取措施减少对中国零部件来源的依赖，但进展甚微。日经亚洲新闻 4 月报道称，苹果将在 2023 年增加对总部位于中国的供应商和中国制造基地的零部件的使用，同时减少对台湾、美国、日本和韩国供应商的使用。苹果在 3 月份表示，正在扩建上海的一个研究中心，并在香港附近的科技中心深圳开设一个新实验室。
战略与国际研究中心高级副总裁詹姆斯·安德鲁·刘易斯告诉我：“每个人都面临着同样的困境”，既担心过度依赖中国，又担心退出后会失去竞争力。“人们都在规避风险。”
“即使苹果愿意，它也需要十年时间才能走出中国”，Counterpoint Research 研究主管杰夫·菲尔德哈克告诉我。“这不仅仅是设备制造的问题，而是庞大的零部件生态系统。”
苹果发言人拒绝讨论该公司在中国的业务。该公司表示，其所有产品均在加州设计，在美国拥有超过 90,000 名员工，而“大中华区”（对苹果而言，包括台湾）的员工数量约为 16,000 名。
如果中美之间的紧张局势继续加剧，那么横跨两个市场的公司所面临的压力只会越来越大。没有简单的出路。
其他地方：高最低工资的成果
加州大学伯克利分校经济学家迈克尔·赖希和加州大学戴维斯分校经济学家丹尼斯·索辛斯基在新发表的工作论文中指出，加州大型快餐连锁店员工的最低工资为 20 美元，“平均时薪提高了 18%，但并没有减少就业”。他们估计，这项政策使价格上涨了约 3.7%，与“行业声称的涨幅更大”相反。他们计算出，在政策出台之前，餐馆的利润率高于竞争水平，吸收了工资支出增加的“很大一部分”。特许经营业主向母公司支付固定比例的特许权使用费，因此当他们提高价格时，母公司会获得更多直接进入底线的资金。
我问过迈克尔·斯特兰，一位曾在印刷品中与赖希就最低工资问题进行辩论的经济学家，他对这项研究有何看法。他说，一些技能最低的工人可能会被解雇，取而代之的是那些被高薪吸引的高技能工人。此外，他还表示，快餐工人在价格上涨的餐厅吃饭，所以“你用右手给工人加薪，用左手拿回一大笔钱。”
每日名言
“股市就像没有马匹的赛马场，不配拥有作为晴雨表的广泛声誉。它有时会播下飓风，而不是报道微风。”
— E.B. White，《股市之字形》，《纽约客》，1955 年 3 月 26 日，收录于《E.B. White：1925-1976 年《纽约客》作品》（1990 年）
Peter Coy 是《纽约时报》观点版的撰稿人，负责经济和商业报道。请通过 coy-newsletter@nytimes.com 给他发送电子邮件。 @彼得科伊