The Bureau of Industry and Security is drafting a final rule to expand its nuclear nonproliferation controls on China and Macau. The agency sent the rule for interagency review July 24.
The U.S. “should move more quickly” to establish a new multilateral export control forum to restrict high tech exports to China now that the Wassenaar Arrangement has become less effective, said William Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official and current Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Reinsch said “multilateralism is the only viable approach to high-tech export controls,” adding that “existing structures are not adequate to the task” and must be replaced by other means for the U.S. and its trading partners to coordinate.
The Bureau of Industry and Security's recently issued guidance for medical-related export license applications (see 2307210019) is a “welcome development” and should be reviewed by exporters submitting applications for medical items to Russia, Belarus and certain regions of Ukraine, Baker McKenzie said July 19. But the firm also said exporters may not always be able to meet all the criteria outlined in the guidance, which offers best practices for the type of information applications should include, such as end-use or end-user statements, a narrow transaction scope and specific descriptions of the items.
The Bureau of Industry and Security sent a final rule for interagency review that would implement export control changes and updates agreed to during the 2022 Wassenaar Arrangement. The rule was sent for review July 18 and would amend the Export Administration Regulations and Commerce Control List.
The Biden administration should wait to place new export controls on the semiconductor industry until it adequately assesses the impact of its existing restrictions, the Semiconductor Industry Association said this week. The U.S. chip industry should be able to continue accessing the China market, SIA said, warning that “repeated steps” to “impose overly broad, ambiguous, and at times unilateral restrictions risk diminishing the U.S. semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, disrupting supply chains, causing significant market uncertainty, and prompting continued escalatory retaliation by China.”
Japan and South Korea signed a “memorandum of cooperation” on export controls last week to better collaborate around the trade measures, according to an unofficial translation of a July 11 news release from Japan’s trade ministry. As part of the memorandum, both sides agreed to hold export control policy dialogues on a “regular basis,” look to “enhance their export control systems and operations while referring to the other's export control systems,” and “take appropriate measures, including reviewing their respective export control systems and operations.”
The U.S. “firmly” opposes export controls by China on certain metals used to produce semiconductors, a Commerce Department spokesperson said July 6. “These actions underscore the need to diversify supply chains,” the person said in an email. “The United States will engage with our allies and partners to address this and to build resilience in critical supply chains.”
As the U.S. continues to expand its chip export controls, South Korean and other multinational firms with semiconductor investments in China “face an uncertain future,” the Peterson Institute for International Economics said in a report this week. The report, authored by PIIE senior fellow Martin Chorzempa, outlines both the “collateral damage and new opportunities” for South Korean companies as a result of the Commerce Department's Oct. 7 controls (see 2210070049), saying Korean firms “have been some of the most impacted non-Chinese firms due to their large memory chip production facilities in China.” The report also recommends the U.S. do more to “reduce uncertainty” for allies operating in the region.
A new rule change by the Bureau of Industry and Security will subject a broader range of chemical mixtures to declaration requirements, including for export or import. The revisions, outlined in a final rule that takes effect July 3, lowers the concentration threshold level at which mixtures containing certain controlled chemicals are subject to the declaration requirements. The change brings the U.S. Chemical Weapons Convention Regulations “into further alignment” with guidelines adopted by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in 2009, which established the lower concentration threshold limit for certain chemicals.
The U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council will host a new “outreach event” next month to speak with industry about dual-use export control issues. The July 19 virtual event will help the TTC’s Export Control Working Group address the “streamlining of possible duplicative actions” faced by exporters who are required to obtain licenses in both the U.S. and EU. Other topics to be discussed include “the similarities and differences between EU General Export Authorisations and US License Exceptions” and information sharing between the exporter and the consignee. The outreach event will “feed into EU-US work” to help reduce the “administrative burden for both economic operators and government authorities.” Participants must register before 6 p.m. June 30.