South Korea’s economic strategy amid the U.S.-China rivalry

Shifting into 2024, relations between the USA and China are as fraught as ever. However what do tensions between the world’s main superpowers imply for smaller actors?

The reply relies on the nation, sector and even agency. South Korean corporations, for instance, look like reaping important advantages from U.S. commerce and know-how restrictions on China, which have at the least slowed — and presumably even reversed — the “China-zation” of producing and world worth chains. However this isn’t the entire story.

Begin with the nice. Since South Korea and China produce lots of the identical sorts of products — resembling client electronics, batteries, automobiles and ships — the much less American (and Western) market share China claims, the extra is left for South Korea. Already, de facto Western sanctions on the Chinese language tech big Huawei have given a lift to the Korean agency Samsung’s wireless-systems gross sales. Equally, if Chinese language trade has much less entry to Western know-how, it’s extra prone to flip to South Korean companies.