Some of the biggest solar factories in Vietnam owned by Chinese people are reducing manufacturing and firing employees as a result of the rising US industry tariff burdens on it and three other Southeast Asian nations.
However, in nearby Indonesia and Laos, a slew of new Chinese-owned thermal plants are popping up, out of the approach of Washington’s business privileges. According to Reuters monitoring, their planned capacity will offer about half the sections installed in the US last season.
Foreign thermal companies have repeatedly reduced output in their existing hubs while building new ones in other countries, enabling them to bypass tariffs and rule the US and worldwide markets despite repeated waves of US tariffs designed to encircle them over the course of more than a decade.
Although Taiwanese companies have been shifting their thermal production for centuries, it has not previously been reported that Indonesia and Laos will be moving into these two new industries.
For this article, more than a hundred people from five different countries were interviewed, including doctors, officials from non-Chinese solar organizations, and employees of Taiwanese plants.
William A. Reinsch, a former trade official in the Clinton administration and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described it as” a huge cat and mouse game.”
” It’s not that hard to move. You start the game, and you continue to sing. The rules are designed so that the US is typically one step beyond.
China accounts for about 80 per share of the world’s solar supplies, while its trade centres somewhere in Asia make up much of the remainder, according to SPV Market Research. That’s a strong contrast to two decades ago when the US was a , world leader in the industry.
America’s exports of renewable materials, however, have tripled since Washington began imposing its taxes in 2012, hitting a record US$ 15 billion last year, according to national statistics.
While virtually none came straight from China in 2023,  , about 80 per cent came from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia – home to companies owned by Chinese companies.
In response to complaints from US companies, Washington imposed tariffs on solar exports from those four South Asian countries last year and increased them in October.
Over the last 18 months, at least four Chinese or China-linked initiatives have begun activities in Indonesia and Laos, and another two , have been announced.  , Together, the projects total 22.9 gigawatts ( GW ) in solar cell or panel capacity.