Renault SA’s Jean-Dominique Senard says Europe hasn’t woken up to the risk that China cuts off raw material supplies, something which keeps the chairman of the French automaker up at night.
(Bloomberg) — Renault SA’s Jean-Dominique Senard says Europe hasn’t woken up to the risk that China cuts off raw material supplies, something which keeps the chairman of the French automaker up at night.
“Of course it wakes me at night — it’s a major strategy issue: we can end up in an insane situation overnight, and no one has anticipated this,” he said on the sidelines of a conference in Aix-en-Provence, adding that the European Union hadn’t assessed the impact of the continent’s dependence on Chinese metals.
Senard alluded to China’s decision this week to impose restrictions on exports of gallium and germanium, two metals crucial to the semiconductor, telecommunications and electric-vehicle industries, in an escalation of the country’s tit-for-tat trade war on technology with the US and Europe. Beijing, which is battling for technological dominance in everything from quantum computing to artificial intelligence and chip manufacturing, cited national security concerns for its move.
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“China — and no one can blame them for that — is putting its hand on mines and especially on the transformation of metals used to build batteries,” Senard said during a panel in Aix. “The war of the future will be a war of metals.”
China is the dominant global producer of both metals, and accounts for 94% of the world’s gallium production, according to the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre. The export limits are also coming at a time when nations around the world are working to rid their supply chains of dependencies on overseas equipment.
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