6 days Ago
US President Donald Trump said he would pursue new tariffs on semiconductor chips, just two days after his administration excluded several electronics from the steep reciprocal tariffs on goods arriving from China. Backing this sudden shift, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told CNN that the US is launching an investigation into semiconductors under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives Trump the means to restrict imports of goods considered critical to US national security. After the White House’s earlier announcement excluding some electronic products from steep reciprocal tariffs on China, China’s commerce ministry said the exemption demonstrated that the US was taking “a small step toward correcting its erroneous unilateral practice of ‘reciprocal tariffs,’” and urged the US to scrap the entire tariff regime.
But the slight lowering of temperatures barely lasted 48 hours, and the new tariffs could upend the entire global electronics industry, including the semiconductor chips sector. Trump’s commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said the US president would impose “a special focus-type of tariff” on smartphones, computers and other electronics products within a month or two, apart from sectoral tariffs aimed at semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. These new tariffs would fall outside the US’s reciprocal tariffs on China, Lutnick added.
Trump’s latest move will have far-reaching implications for the global semiconductor supply chain. While China is the world’s largest chip market in terms of consumption, Asian countries like South Korea, Malaysia and Japan also play an important role in the supply chain, including chip assembly, testing and production. China is America’s leading source of electronic products, followed by Mexico, Taiwan, Vietnam and Malaysia.
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