US President Donald Trump’s administration has announced that smartphones and computers have been excluded from Trump’s 10% baseline global reciprocal tariffs.
The move could help keep the prices down for popular consumer electronics that aren’t usually made in the US.
A notice shared by US Customs and Border Protection said the exemption also applies to the 145% tariffs imposed on Chinese imports, and includes other electronic devices and components, including semiconductors, solar cells and memory cards.
This would benefit American tech giants like Apple, which has 90% of its iPhone production and assembly based in China, according to Wedbush Securities.
The new exemption applies to products that entered the United States or were removed from warehouses from 5 April.
It’s the latest tariff change by the Trump administration, which has made several U-turns in their massive plan to put tariffs in place on goods from most countries. The goal is to encourage more domestic manufacturing. But the exemptions seem to acknowledge that the current electronics supply chain is virtually all in Asia and it will be challenging to shift that to the US.
President Donald Trump’s administration has been predicting its barrage of tariffs targeting China will push Apple into manufacturing the iPhone in the United States for the first time.
But that’s an unlikely scenario even with US tariffs now standing at 145% on products made in China — Apple has manufactured most of its iPhones there since the first model hit the market 18 years ago.
The disincentives for Apple shifting its production domestically include a complex supply chain that it began building in China during the 1990s. It would take several years and cost billions of dollars to build new plants in the US, and then confront Apple with economic forces that could triple the price of an iPhone, threatening to torpedo sales of its marquee product.
