President Trump may be trying to level the playing field when it comes to trade between the U.S. and China, but not every American company has a complaint to file against Beijing.
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When it comes to working out of China, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins described an environment that treats the U.S. tech giant fairly and offers “pretty good access.”
“I can only speak from our perspective, and actually, we’ve had pretty good access to the country,” he told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo during an interview on Tuesday. “We’ve had no real issues, relative to the [intellectual property] theft in the early 2000s.”
After days of negotiations, the U.S. and China announced on Tuesday that Beijing would dramatically reduce its tariffs on imported American vehicles and auto parts from 25% to 15%.
The two economic powerhouses also reportedly agreed to a broad outline to settle a dispute over Chinese telecom giant ZTE. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. will lift its ban on American companies selling components and software to ZTE; in exchange, ZTE will be forced to make significant changes to its management teams, and possibly pay hefty fines.
Trump has been insistent about reducing the trade deficit — which the White House has blamed for the loss of millions of U.S. jobs — between the two countries and has taken aim at China’s practice of intellectual property theft. The United States Trade Representative found that Chinese theft of American IP costs between $225 billion and $600 billion annually.
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But Robbins said those type of issues haven’t plagued Cisco in years.
“In general, we’ve been treated fairly in China, actually,” he said. “We’ve not had any pressure for technology transfer or anything like that. I can’t speak for others, but that’s been our experience.”
