Coronavirus is speeding up the decoupling of global economies

 
Article by Rana Foroohar in "The Financial Times":

 Coronavirus has put a spotlight on the economic decoupling of China and some developed countries. With factories shuttered and consumption stalled, multinational companies have been forced to shift production elsewhere. Apple has warned investors that its revenues will take a hit as a result of the outbreak. 

A gradual decoupling of global economies has been under way for a few years. The South Korean electronics group Samsung, for example, has been closing Chinese plants and opening others in Vietnam. Mexico has benefited from some US corporations moving their supply chains closer to home. But decoupling will undoubtedly speed up as Beijing’s opacity in handling the coronavirus epidemic highlights the risks of doing business in China.

There are marked similarities between the virus and decoupling itself. There is what you see on the surface (masks and panic or supply chain shifts and profit warnings) and then there is what you can’t know: how many victims the outbreak will claim or what the world will look like economically and politically in five to 10 years, as globalisation dissolves and divides deepen.

Still, it is the job of a columnist to go out on a limb, so let me make a few predictions about what may lurk around the corner if the decoupling continues. An increased risk of violence in Taiwan, the inability of Europe to defend its own liberal democratic values, and a world in which smart devices can no longer speak to each other across borders are distinct possibilities. And all of these things could fundamentally reshape the global economy and geopolitics.

The most pressing issue in the short term is Taiwan, whose firms make most of the world’s semiconductors. The majority are produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, a contract chipmaker that supplies US companies, including Apple, and a number of Chinese firms. Semiconductors are a key area in which the Chinese are not yet technologically self-sufficient. In hardware (from routers to switches to handsets), areas of software and high-tech services, the Chinese have already largely decoupled from the US. Consider the success of homegrown firms such as the smartphone maker Xiaomi. Or the telecoms group Huawei’s efforts to build bespoke Chinese operating systems. Or the fact that many of the most innovative new mobile apps are developed in China.

But semiconductors require huge amounts of capital investment and research effort. It could be a decade before China can fully develop its own industry. In the meantime, it will be dependent on Taiwan, which not only supplies US companies, but where support for democracy is growing. This begs the question of whether, or perhaps when, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry might become a political hot potato, as both China and the US try to build their own independent high-tech sectors.

It is hard to imagine that Taiwan will be able to operate in both orbits indefinitely. As one telecoms analyst put it to me recently, “What’s happened in Hong Kong is fascinating and disturbing in part because it raises the question, what happens if the same thing occurs in Taiwan?”

Decoupling also presents an existential challenge for Europe. Last week, the EU came out with a new ethical framework for artificial intelligence, part of its attempt to carve out a “third way” system of tech governance that can exist between the surveillance state of China and the dominance of the big technology companies in the US. But Europe’s telecoms market is dependent on Huawei equipment, which is cheaper than that of its competitors. As one European Commission official admitted to me, “using Huawei in 5G is a foregone conclusion”. This is in large part because 2G, 3G and 4G systems in much of Europe have been built upon it. It would be too expensive to retrofit the system to build out 5G without Huawei today.

If using Huawei does present a security risk (and I’ve been told by any number of Europeans and Americans in both the public and private sector that it does) then one has to wonder if Europe actually has control over its tech governance. Does it have the ability to defend its own liberal values over privacy and data rights in a digital world? Decoupling may, for Europe, become similar to the debate about defence in general. Even if the EU has its own strategy, will it be able to enforce it?

It’s possible, of course, that the US and Europe could come together in some sort of transatlantic tech standards alliance. This would be likely to involve US government subsidies for 5G, given the financial pressures on the European telecoms industry.

But if that doesn’t happen, we may be moving towards a world reminiscent of decades past, when a business trip from the US to Japan or Europe involved having to carry a different 3G phone. This time around, however, the communications gap would exist across the entire technology stack, in both the consumer and the industrial internet.

Imagine a world in which cross-border banking, online shopping and data sharing becomes bifurcated between two systems. That is a reality we may be heading towards. Apple and other tech companies would certainly take a valuation hit in such a future. But so would many others in industries beyond technology. As with coronavirus, the effects of decoupling will be both unpredictable and exponential. 

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