Chinese authorities thwarted a multibillion-dollar effort by the Japanese tech giant SoftBank to expand further into robotics, showing Beijing’s willingness to intervene in global business deals that may impact its own technology ambitions.
On Thursday, ABB, a Swiss-Swedish industrial company, said that the sale of its robotics division to SoftBank for $5.4 billion, which was announced last year, had been blocked by a Chinese regulator that conducts national security reviews of foreign investments.
China’s approval was needed for the SoftBank acquisition to move ahead in part because so much of ABB’s sales come from the country. At a factory in Shanghai, ABB produces a variety of products, mainly used for manufacturing and automating tasks like handling heavy materials and polishing.
China is taking an aggressive approach to reviewing foreign deals involving key technology and sensitive industries. In April, regulators forced Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of the Chinese A.I. start-up Manus.
To block the Manus deal, authorities cited national security concerns, a move seen as signaling the government’s determination to keep important technology and talented engineers from being acquired by foreign companies.
China’s scrutiny of foreign deals is raising concerns about operating in the country as technology development takes on more strategic importance in government planning. Regulators in the United States, European Union and Britain have also intervened in deals involving semiconductors, quantum computing and other technology.
ABB, based in Zurich, has decades-long ties to Chinese manufacturing businesses, which gives it access to valuable data on robotics technology. China is ABB’s largest robotics market and about 90 percent of its machines built for Chinese customers are manufactured locally. The company employs thousands of people in the country.
Chinese authorities were concerned about robotics data being transferred overseas and used to train A.I. models, according to The Financial Times, which first reported that the deal was blocked.
China’s intervention is a major blow to SoftBank and its founder, Masayoshi Son, one of the tech industry’s biggest believers in artificial intelligence. He has staked his company’s future on the technology and has viewed robots as the essential link between the technology and the physical world.
Yet concerns have grown that Mr. Son has put too much emphasis on A.I. SoftBank has invested roughly $65 billion in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and billions more into data center businesses.
On Thursday, shares of SoftBank fell almost 7 percent and are down nearly 30 percent over the past year. The Democratic sweep in the U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday also hit the shares of some big tech firms, as many of the winning governors and legislators have pushed for stricter oversight of the A.I. build-out, which could slow its expansion.
A spokesman for SoftBank did not respond to messages seeking comment.
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