US president Donald Trump has effectively backtracked on the tariff exemptions announced last Friday which indicated that some electronics, like PCs, would escape the country’s 145 percent levy on Chinese goods.
Writing on social media last night, Trump said that “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook'” and that “there was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday” (thanks, BBC News).
Chinese electrical goods would simply now be placed in “a different tariff bucket”, Trump continued, concluding that National Security Tarriff Investigations would be reviewing “the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN”.
US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick has told ABC News that a separate “semiconductor tariff” was now planned – exact details of which are yet to be determined.
“We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels, we need to have these things made in America,” Lutnick said. “We can’t be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us.”
Speaking to CBS News, US trade representative Jamieson Greer confirmed this semiconductor tariff meant Chinese electrical goods had therefore been given something that was “not really an exception. That’s not even the right word for it.”
“It’s not that they won’t be subject to tariffs geared at reshoring,” Greer continued. “They’ll just be under a different regime. It’s shifting from one bucket of tariffs to a different bucket of potential tariffs.”
There’s no detail yet on when this semiconductor tariff may be introduced, or by how much it will impact prices.
Over the weekend, the expectation was that PCs would escape Trump’s tariffs, even if consoles such as Nintendo’s incoming Switch 2 would not.
Ahead of the US’ so-called ‘Liberation Day’, Nintendo had already begun stockpiling Switch 2 consoles in the US, and directed the vast majority of its non-Chinese manufacturing output to the country. Many Switch 2 consoles set to be sold in the US will now have been made in Vietnam – a country which also initially had tariffs introduced, only for them to be paused.
This morning, Sony announced it had raised the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition price in the UK and mainland Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and blamed the “tough decision” on “the backdrop of a challenging economic environment, including high inflation and fluctuating exchange rates”.