With Donald Trump promising new tariffs against China after he’s inaugurated Monday, Joe Tsai has concerns about US-China relations.
Executives of the Brooklyn Nets and its parent company, BSE Global, will privately tell you that they believe rising tensions between the U.S. and China are unlikely to effect things with the NBA or WNBA teams owned by Joe and Clara Wu Tsai … even with President Donald Trump preparing to impose tariffs on Chinese exports once he’s inaugurated Monday.
Neither Tsai is a citizen of China, they note. Joe Tsai, who was born in Taiwan, is a citizen of Canada having moved there as a child before attending high school, college and law school in the United States. Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of the Nets, co-governor of the New York Liberty, is an American citizen born in Kansas. That said, Tsai is the executive chairman of Alibaba, the giant Chinese e-commerce company, and he and his wife have a vast array of connections — through business, sports, culture and philanthropy — that span the countries’ relations and he often comments on relations between the two countries. (Tsai’s sports entities are held separately from Alibaba, being part of his family investment office.)
However, Tsai was not subtle earlier in the week describing how he feels the incoming Trump administration will affect the business and geopolitical environment between the U.S. and China.
“Right now, this is, I could say definitively, the most unfriendly geopolitical environment that we’ve been in,” Tsai said in a fireside chat at the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “As a Chinese company, if we want to do business in the US, we’re gonna get hit by whatever it may be, [including] tariffs.”
He added that this is because Americans believe Chinese exporters and manufacturers are too strong and they are selling too many things, the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong reported. (Alibaba owns the SCMP and Tsai is the newspaper’s chairman.)
As SCMP wrote, the tariffs could be draconian.
US president-elect Donald Trump, who returns to the White House next week, has said he would impose 60 per cent tariffs on Chinese exports. Trump initiated a trade war with China in his first term as president, imposing levies on more than US$300 billion worth of Chinese goods.
As executive chairman and co-founder of Alibaba and owner of an NBA team, he is a high-profile businessman in both countries and often comments on US-China relations. He has been outspoken about both Trump and Biden administration and as he did this week regularly points out the deep interconnections between the two countries’ economies.
“I want to remind the American government that as a platform we sell to Chinese consumers. We sell about US$50 billion of American products to Chinese consumers annually. We’re actually helping to alleviate the trade deficit problem of the US.”
Through Alibaba, Tsai has also been one of China’s biggest proponents of artificial intelligence, a key touchpoint in relations between the two countries. Last year, the Biden Administration banned the sale of certain microchips produced by NVidia to China on national security grounds. In response, Tsai said China would be developing its own AI chips.
How could rising tensions between the U.S. and China affect the Nets? That’s uncertain but tensions between the U.S. and Russia starting with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 ultimately led Mikhail Prokhorov to sell first the Nets, then Barclays Center to Tsai.
BSE Global did not response to an ND request for comment.
In the same forum, Tsai spoke in general about his management philosophy which presumably applies to BSE Global and the Nets as well as Alibaba.
“In the case of a corporation, senior leadership needs to ensure that there is a continuity of mission,” he said. “The most important thing is to bring in people, bring in your second generation, third generation of leadership, cultivate them, so that they can continue your mission.
“If you cannot accommodate people that are better and smarter than you, you become the bottleneck for the company to grow and ensure continuity.”
- Alibaba’s Joe Tsai: Chinese firms face harsh realities amid rising geopolitical tensions – Cao Li – South China Morning Post