President Donald Trump‘s administration has announced the exemption of mobile phones, computers and other popular electronics from so-called “retaliatory tariffs,” limiting the scope of the new measures and preventing potential price impacts for consumers.
The exemptions, released late Friday night by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as Bloomberg reports, involve tariff increases of 125% for China and 10% for other countries. Thus, no additional tariffs will be imposed on smartphones, laptops, hard drives, processors and memory – products that are hardly ever made within the U.S. and whose domestic production would take years to set up.
The same list of exceptions includes semiconductor manufacturing machinery, which favors companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which has announced significant investments within the U.S., and other international microchip makers.
However, the duty exemption may be temporary. The exemptions stem from the White House’s initial order preventing the cumulative imposition of multiple tariffs on certain sectors. This means that these devices may be subject to a different type of tariff in the future, possibly lower – particularly for products of Chinese origin.
One such case concerns semiconductors, where Trump has previously promised a targeted tariff, but has not yet announced a specific rate. So far, the sectoral tariffs that the Trump administration has implemented have been as high as 25%, although it is unclear whether this will apply to high-tech products. The White House has not made an official statement on the matter.
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