FRANKFURT -- Cutting economic ties with China is unrealistic, Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Kallenius told a German newspaper, and attempting to do so would put most of the country's industry at risk.
Europe is trying to reduce its dependency on China as the disruption of the pandemic and the Ukraine crisis have highlighted the dangers of relying on dominant suppliers and the fragility of supply chains.
Kallenius said decoupling from China, the world's second largest economy, was "unthinkable for almost all of German industry."
"The major players in the global economy, Europe, the U.S. and China, are so closely intertwined that decoupling from China makes no sense," he was quoted as saying the tabloid newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
