Taiwan pledges more investment in US, removal of trade barriers after Trump tariffs

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te said on Sunday that Taiwan will not impose reciprocal trade tariffs against the United States, but will remove trade barriers, and that Taiwanese companies will gradually increase their investments in the country.

President Donald Trump announced across-the-board import tariffs on Wednesday, with much higher duties for dozens of trading partners, including Taiwan, which runs a large trade surplus with the U.S. and faces a 32% duty on its products.

The U.S. tariffs, however, do not apply to semiconductors, a major Taiwanese export.

Meeting executives from small and medium-sized companies at his residence, Lai said given Taiwan’s dependence on trade the economy would inevitably have a hard time dealing with the tariffs, but that he thought the impact could be minimised.

“In the face of the U.S. ‘reciprocal tariffs’, Taiwan has no plans to take tariff retaliation, and there will be no change in the investment commitments of enterprises to the United States as long as they are in the national interest,” he said, in comments provided by his office.

Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, last month announced an additional $100 billion investment in the U.S.

“In the future, in addition to TSMC’s increased investment, other industries, such as electronics, information and communications, petrochemicals, and natural gas will be able to increase investment in the U.S. and deepen Taiwan-U.S. industrial cooperation,” Lai said.

Non-tariff trade barriers are an indicator for the U.S. to assess the fairness of trade, and Taiwan will proactively resolve non-tariff trade barriers that have existed for many years to make trade negotiations with the U.S. smoother, he added.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard, Editing by William Maclean and Jan Harvey)