Apple sues Qualcomm in China over mobile chip monopoly

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• Apple sues Qualcomm in Beijing seeking 1 billion yuan ($145 million) / Reuters
  The dominant American manufacturer of communications chips for mobile phones, Qualcomm, is being sued in a Chinese court twice by Apple, once for unfair market practices and again for breaking a licensing agreement. This follows numerous legal complaints in the past month against Qualcomm, including on January 17 from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for anti-competitive tactics. Qualcomm was previously the subject of one of China’s highest-profile anti-monopoly cases, which applied a 2008 law to fine the company $975 million in 2015.
  In other computer chip news, an official at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology made a rare public interview to call U.S. concern over Chinese chip investments “unnecessary panic.” Wilbur Ross, the nominee for U.S. secretary of commerce, said last week that he is “very, very concerned” about Chinese investments in the sector. The Obama administration estimated last year that China was spending $150 billion on semiconductor research over the next decade, but China disputes this figure and says it “far, far” exceeds actual spending.
• China’s newest problem with fakes threatens bond market plan / Bloomberg
  Analysts are predicting a record number of defaults in Chinese corporate debt in 2017, due to a number of factors: the willingness of Chinese executives to engage in unethical behavior to save a struggling business; the recent cases of forged official seals in bond trading worth billions; a “severe lack of risk control” in legal structures around debt and finance; and a trend line based on a skyrocketing number of defaults in 2016 compared with the years before.

• Jack Ma’s Ant Financial pushes into U.S. with $880m Moneygram acquisition / Tech in Asia
• This Chinese soccer team is worth more than AC Milan / Bloomberg
• Toutiao: Chinese news app with 600 million users that you’ve never heard of / MIT Technology Review
• Smog: Who’s cashing in while China chokes? / SCMP
• Trump candidacy grounded coveted China project / WSJ (paywall)
• The little-known role of Western economists in building a post-Mao China / NYT (paywall)