The US SIA calls for dialogue and avoiding escalation in semiconductor trade dispute between US and China

By Greg Gao

(JW Insights) Jul 18 -- The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) released on July 17 a statement regarding potential additional US government restrictions on semiconductors and call on dialogue to avoid further escalation between US and China.

“We call on both governments to ease tensions and seek solutions through dialogue, not further escalation. And we urge the administration to refrain from further restrictions until it engages more extensively with industry and experts to assess the impact of current and potential restrictions to determine whether they are narrow and clearly defined, consistently applied, and fully coordinated with allies,” said the SIA statement.

“Recognizing that strong economic and national security require a strong US semiconductor industry, leaders in Washington took bold and historic action last year to enact the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen our industry’s global competitiveness and de-risk supply chains,” SIA said.

“Allowing the industry to have continued access to the China market, the world’s largest commercial market for commodity semiconductors, is important to avoid undermining the positive impact of this effort. Repeated steps, however, to impose overly broad, ambiguous, and at times unilateral restrictions risk diminishing the US semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, disrupting supply chains, causing significant market uncertainty, and prompting continued escalatory retaliation by China,” the association stated.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that America’s largest semiconductor companies are embarking on a last-ditch effort to head off new curbs on their sales to China, with senior executives traveling to Washington this week for talks with administration officials and lawmakers.

The chief executive officers of Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc. and Nvidia Corp. are planning to lobby against extending restrictions on the sale to China of certain chips and the equipment to manufacture the semiconductors that the Biden administration is set to roll out in the coming weeks, said Bloomberg.