Posted on 08/31/2023 3:53:19 AM PDT by FarCenter
SEOUL -- South Korean semiconductor shipments fell sharply in July, an apparent example of how the slowdown in China is hurting export-oriented economies elsewhere in Asia.
Data from the official statistics agency released Thursday show that chip shipments tumbled 31.2% from the previous month, while exports of electronic components dropped 22.7%.
In recent years, semiconductors have been a product of growing importance in South Korea, accounting for roughly one-fifth of all exports. Chip sales increased drastically as demand for electronics soared during the COVID pandemic, hitting a record $128 billion in 2021.
The data did not provide a country breakdown, but China is South Korea's largest trading partner and was the destination for 19.6% of exports in the first seven months of this year. Thursday's data will fan concerns that a prolonged slowdown in the neighboring nation, the world's second-biggest economy, could worsen South Korea's already-tepid growth.
South Korea's gross domestic product grew 0.6% in the April-June quarter, following an expansion of 0.3% the preceding quarter and a contraction of 0.4% in the fourth quarter of last year. The country's central bank has forecast growth of 1.4% for this year, revised down from an earlier projection of 1.6%, in what would be among the weakest expansions in years.
A report earlier this month by the Hyundai Research Institute, a think tank, flagged the possibility of South Korea's economy declining along with China's due to the highly interconnected trade relationship between the two nations.
(Excerpt) Read more at asia.nikkei.com ...
No US workers were hurt....
We let China to come out of starvation. Gave them all our know how, and now we are dependent on those communists.
We need to stop the dependence.
It is an consequence of past fifty years of mistaken approach to China.
It will be painful, but it is the only way.
This is actually a surprise to me that China doesn’t dominate the chip market and would need the Korean products...
China started out as an assembly workshop using lots of foreign parts to make PCs, smartphones, etc. Early Foxconn manufacturing would be an example.
Then it started to make the mechanical and lower difficulty parts such as cases, connectors, power modules, and all the mechanical bits and pieces.
It’s still true that the cameras, displays, and most ICs come from Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese manufacturers, although some of them now locate production in China.
Well that in a way brings some comfort. I honestly assumed/figured China was pretty much stand alone with all the tech transfer over the years...
Thanks for the reply!
Chinese technology is somewhat a myth. Not that long ago China was making most of the ball point pens in the world but they had to import the actual ball point mechanism because could not make them on their own. When there was a CCP driven push to make their own mechanisms it took them 5 years to produce something comparable to the European products they were importing.
A computer chip is much more difficult to produce than a ball point pen...
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