Maroš Šefčovič

Clear answer is no.

Just look at the companies which we are investigating or eventually finding.

And are we kind of, you know, favoring the European companies in this case?

Again, no.

And I was just providing my both counterparts

with the fact that a lot of these investigations are actually prompted by the complaints which are coming from American companies which are also located here in the EU.

They want to make sure that US companies are treated fairly, in non-discriminatory manner, when we would use more, I would say, the possibility of the settlement than fines.

And all these things have been also discussed with American partners, also by my colleagues,

who are responsible for these sectors.

Yes, I think that there I can say that we are in very close contacts with Foreign Trade Minister Wang Wentao and also his team.

So we are communicating on different levels.

We had here the team from China specializing on export controls like a couple of weeks ago.

And I think we are getting initial reports from our industry that they are getting these general licenses, but we need to have a little bit more granular information to evaluate the whole process.

But the fact that this idea was favorably received, that it seems that we are getting first general licenses, and also that the Chinese side was receptive to our arguments that the process as it was set up in April

required too much of a very intrusive information, too many photographs, too much detail about the supply chains.

And I think that the general licensing could be one of the solutions how to address this issue.

I think that we kind of set up a kind of hotline with the Minister Wang Bentao for, I would say, priority cases.

So we are talking on our level quite regularly, but especially our teams are in permanent contact because indeed we had moments over the last year where on my table I saw that pile of the letters from the worried CEOs of

different new companies about the lack of permanent magnets, lack of legacy chips and so on and so forth was really growing quite rapidly and we needed to address it.

So now I think that we set up the good channels on working level and political level to address this issue.