Apple has escaped the China tariffs for now →
source: bloomberg.comDebby Wu, Josh Wingrove, and Shawn Donnan, reporting for Bloomberg:
The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump’s 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries.
The exclusions would apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives and computer processors and memory chips. Those popular consumer electronics items generally aren’t made in the US. Setting up domestic manufacturing would take years.
The products that won’t be subject to Trump’s new tariffs also include machines used to make semiconductors. That would be important for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which has announced a major new investment in the US as well as other chipmakers.
Given that Apple is the nation’s largest tax payer, and that these ungodly high China-specific tariffs would give Samsung an obvious competitive advantage, this is a no-brainer.