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After announcing this week that most products shipped to the US from China would be subject to tariffs of 145 percent, the Trump Administration has rolled back tariffs on smartphones, laptop and desktop computers, chips, and other components that are not generally manufactured in the US.
That doesn't mean there are no tariffs on those items. But products shipped from Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and other places will have the same 10 percent tariffs that are currently levied on most imports, while items shipped from China may carry higher fees thanks to other tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on Chinese exports earlier this year. But the fees won't be high enough to more than double the price of a computer or smartphone… at least for now.
Keep in mind that this is a rapidly changing situation. Federal officials have suggested several times in recent weeks that there are plans afoot to implement a separate set of tariffs on semiconductors and the tools used to make them.
There's plenty of debate over whether this is a strategy to increase domestic manufacturing, negotiate better terms for global trade deals, or whether there's really any strategy behind the latest moves at all.
But what is clear is that the rapid rate at which the US government has been introducing, increasing, reducing, or removing tariffs in recent months has led to a lot of uncertainty.
This week US-based laptop maker Framework, which manufactures products in Taiwan and ships them to customers around the globe, delayed plans to take pre-orders from customers in the US for the company's newest laptop, announced plans to raise prices across its product line, and then reversed all of those decisions in a matter of days as a response to the rapidly shifting tariff situation.
Meanwhile DroiX, a retailer that sells Chinese products to global customers, didn't announce any pricing changes… instead the company announced that it was going to stop charging duty fees to US customers at checkout, because fees are changing so rapidly that it's unclear if the amount you pay at checkout would be the amount due by the time the package arrives in the United States. So DroiX is now telling US customers that they're responsible for paying any fees to have their packages released by customs.
Honestly, I'm at the point where I'm getting tired writing about tariffs, especially since there's a chance that this article will be outdated by the time you read it too. But there's no way to avoid that these tariffs could dramatically affect the cost of purchasing consumer electronics in the coming days, weeks, months, and years, so I'll probably continue to write about them from time to time because there's no point in writing about inexpensive computers and accessories if tariffs are going to increase their prices by 10 to 100 percent or more.
via Bloomberg and The New York Times (both paywalled)
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