Trump’s China trip opens doors for US business

(By Caixin journalists Du Zhihang, Yue Yue, Zou Xiaotong and Ding Yi)

US President Donald Trump’s summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing last week highlighted how deeply intertwined major American companies remain with the world’s second-largest economy despite years of geopolitical and trade tensions.

The business executives accompanying Trump came from industries at the centre of US-China competition — including finance, semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), consumer technology, biotechnology and aerospace. 

Among the most closely watched were Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook, Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Qualcomm Inc. CEO Cristiano Amon, BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO David Solomon, Boeing Co. CEO Kelly Ortberg and Illumina Inc. CEO Jacob Thaysen, whose companies have immense stakes in China.

For some firms, the trip offered a chance to deepen access to a market that is opening its doors wider to foreign participation in areas like finance and payments. For others, it was an opportunity to revive businesses battered by export controls, regulatory scrutiny or safety concerns.

Taken together, the delegation reflected a broader reality: Even as Washington and Beijing remain locked in a strategic rivalry, many of America’s largest companies still view China as indispensable — whether as a lucrative market, a manufacturing base, a growth engine or a vital link in global supply chains.

Wall Street spots an opening

Particular attention focused on the heads of six major Wall Street firms: Blackstone Inc. CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Citigroup Inc. CEO Jane Fraser, Mastercard Inc. CEO Michael Miebach and Visa Inc. CEO Ryan McInerney, as well as Fink and Solomon.

Their companies span asset management, investment banking, commercial banking, private equity and payments, and all have spent years building a foothold in China.

The executives hoped to use the visit to press Chinese authorities on pending business issues while demonstrating their commitments to long-term operations in the country, according to US media reports.

In March 2025, a consortium led by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with a number of ventures in China, reached a US$22.8 billion deal to acquire 43 ports operated by Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. The transaction remains under an antitrust review by China’s market regulator.

In November 2025, Goldman Sachs CEO Solomon said that global investors were gradually returning to China’s stock market, which had regained about half of the roughly US$6 trillion in value lost between 2020 and 2022, expecting the recovery to continue into 2026.

Schwarzman has consistently had a positive view of the Chinese market over the years. In March 2025, he said publicly in Beijing that Blackstone had full confidence in China’s economy.

Citigroup scored a regulatory breakthrough during Trump’s Beijing trip. Its application for a licence to run a wholly owned securities firm in China — a process that had stretched more than four years — was approved by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. The bank had previously overhauled its China operation, selling its Chinese mainland retail wealth-management business to HSBC China and shifting focus to serving institutional clients.

During an interview with CNBC in early May, Fraser said it was “very important to see engagement” between the two economic superpowers.

“From the Citi perspective, we’ve been in China for 124 years. It’s a very important market,” she said.

Mastercard, the payment clearing network provider, has operated in China for nearly four decades. Its joint venture (JV) with NetsUnion Clearing Corp. received approval in 2023 to offer bank card-clearing services in China, making it the second foreign institution allowed to do so in the country. As of July 2025, the JV had partnered with more than 20 banks to roll out nearly 100 bank card products.

By contrast, Visa’s clearing business in China remains in the preparatory stage. Although it became the first foreign company to apply for a bank card-clearing licence in China back in 2017, it still has not received approval.

Chipmakers eye a comeback

Nvidia’s Huang boarded Air Force One as a last-minute addition to Trump’s delegation. During his stay in Beijing, Nvidia’s market capitalisation hit a record high of more than US$5.7 trillion, reflecting investors’ optimism that the company could regain access to the Chinese market.

Nvidia dominates the market for AI chips used to train large language models. However, the company’s market share in China has declined rapidly due to tighter US and Chinese regulations.

Nvidia has been cut off from supplying graphics processing units (GPUs) to China for more than a year. Since mid-2025, Huang has repeatedly complained that US export restrictions have devastated the company’s China business. In an April interview, he reiterated that Nvidia’s China market share had fallen to zero, arguing that the US policy to restrict chip sales to China had “already largely backfired”.

Under Biden, Nvidia rolled out a lower-performance China-specific chip called the H20 as a workaround to export controls. But the Trump administration ordered Nvidia to obtain a US government licence before exporting H20 chips to China. The US later softened its stance, allowing Nvidia to sell H20s in exchange for 15% of its China revenue, but security concerns emerged in China and the chip failed to secure new orders.

At a company conference in March, Huang said that Nvidia had secured US government permission to sell the more powerful H200 chips to Chinese customers and had restarted their production.

A person close to Nvidia told Caixin that the company earlier this year opened a new Shanghai office, a sign of its hopes for China.

Micron Technology Inc. is another chipmaker that is trying to capitalise on the Beijing trip to rebuild business in China after suffering regulatory setbacks.

In May 2023, the Chinese government banned Micron from selling its products to China after the cyberspace regulator said that Micron products posed “relatively serious” cybersecurity risks to the country’s critical information infrastructure supply chain and national security. More than a year later, Washington tightened its export controls on high-bandwidth memory (HBMs), a Micron specialty.

In its 2025 annual report, Micron said that the Chinese cybersecurity review had hurt its business, particularly in China’s data centre and networking markets. The company is also facing tougher competition from domestic memory chip makers including ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc. and Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp.

Micron’s Chinese mainland revenue share declined from about 14% in 2023 to 12.1% in 2024 and 7.1% in 2025, even as its overall revenue grew rapidly.

If the China-US relationship and the policy environment improve, Micron could still have a chance to rebuild its business and customer base in China as demand for memory chips rises from an AI boom, an industry analyst said.

Biotechnology firm Illumina is pursuing a similar comeback.

In March 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce barred Illumina from exporting its gene sequencers to China, following its 4 February decision to place the company on its Unreliable Entity List.

After Beijing put export restrictions on its gene sequencers, an essential and expensive life science tool, Illumina sought a path back into China. On 5 November 2025, the Ministry of Commerce said that it would stop enforcing the restrictions on Illumina. But the company remains on the Unreliable Entity List, meaning that Chinese companies must apply for approval to conduct transactions with it.

Supply chains hold firm

Among the US companies that joined Trump’s state visit to China, many have had deep roots in the country, particularly through extensive supply chain cooperation.

Qualcomm’s Amon told reporters on 14 May that China has a “vibrant economy” and “will continue to play a role in the supply chain”. Combining American technology with China’s scale will create tremendous opportunities, he said.

Qualcomm is now working with about 20 Chinese partners on 6G development as part of a broader effort to deploy the next generation wireless communication technology from 2029.

In recent years, Apple has tried to shift iPhone assembly from China to India and other countries due to geopolitical factors, but the advantages of China’s supply chain are hard to replicate in the short term, Sui Qian, founder of tech research firm Smart Analytics Global, told Caixin.

China is Apple’s largest single market outside the US and accounted for more than 20% of the company’s revenue in 2023. However, Apple has increasingly found itself locked in fierce competition in China as domestic smartphone brands encroach on the high-end market.

AI deals and disputes

Musk has long viewed China as an indispensable electric vehicle (EV) market, but is increasingly focused on AI infrastructure, outlining plans to use SpaceX to send terawatt-scale computing capacity into space.

Meta Platforms Inc. has taken a different approach to AI, purchasing a Chinese-founded AI agent startup Manus for US$2 billion.

In late 2025, the deal triggered security concerns from Chinese regulators. On 27 April this year, the Office of the Security Review Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment of China’s top economic planner announced that it had legally prohibited the acquisition of Manus and ordered the parties to unwind the transaction.

Meta has stayed mum on the Chinese ruling. While the company has often published lengthy rebuttals in response to youth safety controversies or antitrust fines, it made no dedicated announcement on the Manus decision. On a recent earnings call, an executive said the company was still working through the specifics and had no update.

Anupam Chander, a law and technology professor at Georgetown University, told Caixin that Meta could potentially seek a technology licensing agreement with Manus in the future.

Boeing’s breakthrough

Few companies illustrate the political symbolism of US-China trade relations more clearly than Boeing. 

China is projected to become the world’s largest civil aviation market by 2043. Yet the US aircraft maker has gone nine straight years without a major order from China and was eager to break the streak during Trump’s trip to China. On 16 May, Boeing confirmed to Caixin that it secured an initial commitment from China to purchase 200 airplanes after the Trump-Xi summit.

The US plane maker said Ortberg’s trip to China was “very successful”, adding that it expects to secure more Chinese orders in the future.

Despite the breakthrough, the commitment fell short of market expectations for 500 planes and was smaller than the 300-aircraft deal signed during Trump’s 2017 China visit under his first term.

Lu Yutong, Luo Guoping and Zhang Yuzhe contributed to this story.

This article was first published by Caixin Global as “In Depth: Trump’s China Trip Opens Doors for U.S. Business”. Caixin Global is one of the most respected sources for macroeconomic, financial and business news and information about China.

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