在中美关系紧张之际，作为美国跨国企业在中国市场进行买卖或销售变得不再那么容易了。两国政府间的角力迫使公司们做出选择。
以福特（Ford）为例，在今年一月，两个国会委员会的领导人呼吁拜登政府调查四家中国公司，声称这些公司与福特计划在密歇根州设立的电池工厂有牵连。委员会主席指控这四家公司与中国军方、共产党、朝鲜政权以及新疆地区的人权问题存在关联。
同样，苹果（Apple）也未能幸免于中美关系的波动。多年来，苹果为了取悦中国政府的需求，已做出了一系列调整，包括屏蔽多种应用程序，比如新闻媒体、VPN和加密通讯服务等。苹果甚至在中国设立了一座数据中心来存储中国公民的信息—— iCloud 包含了个人联系人、照片及电子邮件。
福特与苹果曾将中国市场视为巨大商机的亮点，但如今却不得不频繁地应对解释的压力。例如，福特向《路透社》表示其业务遵循美国政府法规；而 Apple CEO 蒂姆·库克（Tim Cook）强调公司的美式属性：“我知道，像 Apple 这样的公司只能来自美国——并且我们始终致力于回馈这个伟大的国家。”
一个名为“策略风险”的12人商业情报公司发布的最新分析报告中，将福特列为最易受中国影响的美国大公司之一（排在首位的是Carrier Global，专门从事供暖、通风和空调业务）。尽管其他分析师可能会给予它们较低评价。然而，这份排名仍然引发了对苹果与特斯拉等公司如何应对中国市场策略的关注。
对于美国企业而言，它们面临着一个两难的境地：与中国作为伙伴进行合作的同时，又可能成为竞争对手。中国市场的吸引力是巨大的，但美国进入市场的企业却为中国带来了宝贵的知识产权——这有时是主动的，有时则是被动接受的。如今，在中国的科技追赶甚至在某些领域超越了美国之后，美企面临的难题变成了如何在巨大成本与失去中国市场之间作出选择。
对于福特现任CEO吉姆·法利（Jim Farley）而言，这一困境尤为凸显。今年五月份从中国返回后，他向董事会成员表达了对中企在电动汽车领域的迅猛发展的震惊，并称这构成了“生存威胁”。尽管美国征收高额关税阻挠了中国电动汽车进入美国市场，但福特却预计其电动车辆业务将在2024年亏损约50亿美元。
为应对挑战，法利采取了一种中间立场。虽然从美国政府获得补贴来在密歇根生产电池，但他也向中国的 CATL 公司（全球最大的电动车电池制造商）获取技术授权，这一做法承认了中国的技术领导地位，并承诺自主制造能力。为了维持与中企的竞争优势，法利最新策略是在加利福尼亚建立新业务部门专门设计全新的电动汽车和电池。
这些努力的成效仍待验证，一些华尔街分析师对此持怀疑态度。“聚焦核心”，高盛分析员约翰·墨菲（John Murphy）在6月的一次演讲中警告称，福特、通用汽车及斯泰兰蒂斯（Chrysler母公司）应专注于在美国北美的汽油动力卡车销售，这仍然十分盈利，同时“逐渐投资于自动驾驶、连接和电动车辆”。对于中国业务来说，福特表示已实现盈利。
尽管苹果在中国仍享有广泛赞誉，但它正在失去智能手机市场份额，并面临着政治风向的变化。为保持政府关系，中国政府机构及国企禁止员工使用 iPhone 等外国设备。据《纽约时报》报道，作为苹果流媒体服务 Jon Stewart 节目的结束原因之一部分是因为中国和人工智能相关话题引发的担忧。
尽管如此，苹果仍努力减少对中国的依赖，但进展有限。据《日经亚洲》4月份报告指出，在2023年中，苹果增加了从中国大陆供应商及工厂采购部件的比例，减少了台湾、美国、日本和韩国供应商的使用；同时宣布在上海扩大研发中心并在深圳开设新实验室，作为科技枢纽接近香港。
中美之间的紧张关系持续升级，对于在两国市场间游走的企业来说，压力只会增加。解决这一困境并非易事。
加州对大快餐连锁业工人的最低工资提升至20美元/小时，导致平均时薪提高了18%，但未削减就业。根据加州经济学家迈克尔·里奇（Michael Reich）和丹尼斯·索斯基的最新研究论文，该政策促使物价上涨了约3.7%——与行业声称的涨幅不同。研究还表明，在实施政策之前，餐厅利润就已高于竞争水平，并吸收了工资上涨的一部分成本。而特许经营者向母公司支付其收入固定百分比作为特许费，因此当他们提高价格时，大部分额外利润都直接流入了母公司收益。
我询问经济学家迈克尔·斯廷恩（Michael Strain）对此研究的看法。他指出一些低技能工人的可能被解雇并替换为因薪酬上涨而被吸引的更高技能的工人；同时强调快餐工人在提高了价格的地方消费，因此他们的收入有所增加但又因为价格上涨而有所减少。
“股票市场有时播下风暴而非报导微风”，——E.B. 白认为股票市场的广泛声誉并未得到公正体现，《纽约客》1955年3月26日的专栏文章《股市反复无常》，后集结于《E.B. White：来自新 Yorker 1925-1976》(1990)。
新闻来源：www.nytimes.com
原文地址：Opinion | Breaking Up With China Is Hard to Do
新闻日期：2024-09-30
原文摘要：
It’s not an easy time to be an American multinational company that sells to or buys from China. As the governments of the United States and China butt heads, they’re pressuring companies to take sides. Look at Ford. In January, the heads of two congressional committees asked the Biden administration to investigate four Chinese companies that they said were involved in Ford’s planned battery factory in Michigan. The committee chairs claimed that the companies had ties to the Chinese military, the Communist Party, the North Korean government and human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region. Or look at Apple. As this newspaper has reported, “For years, Apple has bowed to Beijing’s demands that it block an array of apps, including newspapers, VPNs and encrypted messaging services.” Apple “also built a data center in the country to house Chinese citizens’ iCloud information, which includes personal contacts, photos and email,” The Times wrote. The two companies — which once saw business with China as a major bright spot — are repeatedly forced to scramble to explain. Ford, for example, told Reuters it follows U.S. government regulations “across our business.” Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook talks up the company’s Americanness: “I know that a company like Apple could only come from America — and we are as committed as ever to giving back to our great country,” he said in Arizona in 2022. An analysis released Monday by Strategy Risks, a 12-person business intelligence company focused on relations with China, lists Ford first and Apple third in a ranking of exposure to China among the 250 biggest publicly traded firms in the United States. (Second on the list is Carrier Global, the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning company.) Other analysts might rank the companies lower. You could make a case that Tesla, ranked fourth by Strategy Risks, is more exposed than Ford, Carrier or Apple. But the publication of the list nonetheless invites a look at the China strategies of two of America’s most famous companies. The question that bedevils American C.E.O.s is how close to get to Chinese frenemies: companies that can be both friends as partners and enemies as competitors. The Chinese market is lucrative, but American companies that have entered it have given the Chinese valuable intellectual property — sometimes willingly, sometimes not. As Chinese companies have caught up and in some cases surpassed American companies in technology, the new question for the American ones is whether to attempt to fight their way back to the forefront, at great cost, or cede the market to the Chinese and become their customers. That’s the dilemma these days for Jim Farley, who has been the chief executive of Ford since 2020. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Farley returned from a China trip in May amazed by Chinese companies’ progress in electric vehicles, telling a fellow Ford board member that “this is an existential threat.” Ford has predicted it will lose around $5 billion on its electric vehicle operations in 2024. That’s in spite of high tariffs that block Chinese E.V.’s from the American market. In August Ford announced it was pulling the plug on an all-electric, three-row sport utility vehicle and delaying the rollout of a large electric pickup truck by about 18 months, to 2027. Farley is steering a middle course with regard to China. Ford is taking subsidies from the U.S. government to make batteries in Michigan. But it’s licensing technology for them from China’s C.A.T.L., the world’s largest maker of E.V. batteries. That amounts to an acknowledgment of Chinese technological leadership, coupled with a commitment to in-house manufacturing. Farley’s latest tactic for keeping up with Chinese competition is setting up a new operation in the Los Angeles area to design electric vehicles that will be entirely new from the pavement up, built around those new batteries. It might work, or it might not. Some Wall Street analysts are skeptical. “Focus on your core,” John Murphy, a Bank of America analyst, said in a talk in June. He said Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, should focus on selling gasoline-powered trucks in North America, which remain highly profitable, while “ultimately investing in autonomous connected and electric vehicles over time.” (Ford says its Chinese operations have turned profitable.) Apple, though still widely admired in China, is losing market share in smartphones and encountering political headwinds. While Apple has tried to remain in the good graces of the government, Chinese agencies and government-backed firms have banned their employees from bringing iPhones and other foreign devices to work. Jon Stewart’s show on Apple’s streaming service ended last year partly because potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives, The Times reported. Apple has made moves to reduce its reliance on Chinese sources for parts but has made little progress. Nikkei Asia reported in April that Apple increased its use of parts from China-headquartered suppliers and Chinese manufacturing sites in 2023, while using fewer suppliers from Taiwan, the United States, Japan and South Korea. Apple said in March that it was expanding a research center in Shanghai and opening a new lab in Shenzhen, the tech hub near Hong Kong. “Everyone has the same dilemma” of fearing over-dependence on China but also worrying about becoming uncompetitive if they pull out, James Andrew Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “People are hedging their bets.” “It would take Apple a decade to get out of China” even if it wanted to, Jeff Fieldhack, a research director for Counterpoint Research, told me. “It’s not just the building of devices. It’s the huge ecosystem of components.” An Apple spokesman declined to discuss the company’s exposure to China. The company says it designs all its products in California and has more than 90,000 employees in the United States, versus about 16,000 in “Greater China,” which for Apple includes Taiwan. If tensions between China and the United States continue to ratchet up, the pressure on companies that straddle the two markets will only intensify. There is no easy way out. California’s $20 minimum wage for workers in big fast-food chains “increased average hourly pay by a remarkable 18 percent, and yet did not reduce employment,” according to a new working paper by the economists Michael Reich of the University of California, Berkeley, and Denis Sosinskiy of the University of California, Davis. The policy increased prices about 3.7 percent, “contrary to industry claims of larger increases,” they estimated. Profit margins of restaurants were above competitive levels before the policy and absorbed “a substantial share” of the increased expense on wages, they calculated. Franchise owners pay a fixed percentage of their revenue in royalties to their parent companies, so when they raised prices, the parent companies got more money that went straight to the bottom line. I asked Michael Strain, an economist who has debated Reich on minimum wages in print, what he thought of the research. He said some of the lowest-skilled workers might be fired and replaced by higher-skilled workers who would be attracted by the higher pay. Also, he said fast-food workers eat at the restaurants where prices rose, so “you’re kind of giving a pay boost to workers with your right hand and you’re taking a bunch of it back with your left hand.” “The stock market, which is a sort of horse track without the horses, does not deserve its wide reputation as a barometer. It sometimes sows the hurricane, instead of reporting the breeze.” — E.B. White, “Stock Market Zigzags,” The New Yorker, March 26, 1955, collected in “E.B. White: Writings from The New Yorker 1925-1976” (1990)
