US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview on Sunday that smartphones, computers and some other electronics will be subject to a new tariff rate that is separate from others that President Donald Trump has put on imports from China in recent weeks.
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Speaking in an interview with ABC’s This Week in which he was grilled about a tariff exemption on a wide range of electronics, including smartphones, including equipment used to make semiconductors, Lutnick said these products will face “sectoral tariffs” instead of the so-called “reciprocal” levies announced earlier this month.
Details of the new tariff rate will come out in the US Federal Register this week and they may take effect in “a month or so”, Lutnick said.
“We did that in autos,” the official explained, apparently referring to a 100 per cent tariff that former president Joe Biden’s administration put on Chinese EVs.
Trump “is going to do it for pharmaceuticals, I think he’s going to do it for semiconductors, so all those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they’re going to have a special focus-type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored.
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“We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels,” he added. “We need to have these things made in America. We can’t be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us.”
