FEBRUARY ASIA BUSINESS OUTLOOK9AGerman business delegation, including top firms for tunnel machines, wind farms and industrial supplies, is joining President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in a visit to Vietnam starting on Jan 23, as Berlin pushes its China de-risking strategy.German companies have invested over $3 billion in the Southeast Asian manufacturing hub, with automotive giant Bosch being the main investor, according to the German Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam, which sees the country as an important partner in diversifying some activities from China.During the visit, Steinmeier and German labour minister Hubertus Heil are expected to sign with their Vietnamese counterparts a memorandum of understand-ing on skilled labour mobility to facilitate transfers of Vietnamese workers to Germany.Among the companies participating in the business mission is Herrenknecht, which dominates the global market for tunnel boring machines. It is already selling tools for the building of the metro in Ho Chi Minh City amid Vietnam's plans to expand its railway and metro systems.Wind farm developer PNE AG is also part of the delegation, possibly trying to tap into Vietnam's planned expansion in the offshore wind sector despite regulatory delays. Building materials multinational Knauf Gips KG and automotive sector's supplier Tesa are among the other participants. Both already have operations in Vietnam.The visit "underlines Germany's interest in looking beyond China and diversifying its economic relations," said Florian Feyerabend, the representative in Vietnam for Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank. Teradyne, a supplier of semiconductor testing equipment, relocated manufacturing worth approximately $1 billion from China last year, according to a Teradyne spokesperson on Jan 29, following supply chain disruptions caused by US export regulations. The company's main manufacturing site for semiconductor test equipment was a factory in Suzhou, which was subcontracted to Flextronics.Teradyne, based in Massachusetts, relocated its production after US rules issued in October 2022 restricted exports to semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the country in an effort to prevent US technology from being used by China's military. Many US companies have been attempting to reduce their reliance on China in recent years, as the US-China tech war heats up and regulators restrict trade in sensitive technologies such as chip manufacturing.Teradyne, which reports earnings on Tuesday, warned investors in its 2022 annual report about the potential impact of the October regulations, and in October 2023 said the restrictions hit both Teradyne's sales to certain companies in China and its manufacturing and development operations. On Jan 26, Teradyne's director of global compliance and ethics, Brian Amero, told a virtual export conference about the move out of China."We did manufacturing in China, so we had to get an emergency authorization to continue that activity," Amero said at the Massachusetts Export Center's annual export expo. "We decided that was too risky so we moved manufacturing out of China -- at no insignificant expense". NEWSROOMGERMANY TO IMPORT SKILLED LABOUR FROM VIETNAM AS PART OF DE-RISKING STRATEGYUS EXPORT REGULATIONS RESULTS IN REMOVAL OF MANUFACTURING FROM CHINA
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