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Bloomberg
US technology companies would pay an additional $1 billion a month or more in tariffs if President Donald Trump follows through on his threat to impose duties on additional Chinese imports next month, a trade group said.
Trump said last week that he plans to add a 10 percent tariff on essentially all remaining Chinese imports — a category of goods valued at $300 billion that includes a raft of consumer and tech goods. About $250 billion in imports from China have already been hit with a 25 percent tariff.
The Consumer Technology Association said the industry paid $1.7 billion in tariffs in June. The additional levies set to take effect on September 1 would impact about $13 billion in technology imports from China that month, including mobile phones, laptops, televisions and smartwatches, the group said. “Tariffs are taxes — and increasing costs on companies puts consumers in the middle of President Trump’s trade war,†Gary Shapiro, the group’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.
In response to the threat of new tariffs, China let the yuan depreciate — making Chinese goods more competitive for overseas buyers — and cut off purchases of US agricultural products. The Trump administration then escalated the trade war by formally labelling China a currency manipulator, raising the prospects of a prolonged trade battle between the world’s two-largest economies.