The many ways tarrifs will hit your electronics

Summary

Like the industry he covers, Shawn DuBravac had already had quite a week by the time IEEE Spectrum spoke to him early last Thursday, 10 April 2025. As chief economist at IPC, the 3,000-member industry association for electronics manufacturers, he’s tasked with figuring out the impact of the tsunami of tariffs the U.S. government has planned, paused, or enacted. Earlier that morning he’d recalculated price changes for electronics in the U.S. market following a 90-day pause on steeper tariffs that had been unveiled the previous week, the implementation of universal 10 percent tariffs, and a 125 percent tariff on Chinese imports. A day after this interview, he was recalculating again, following an exemption on electronics of an unspecified duration. According to DuBravac, the effects of all this will likely include higher prices, less choice for consumers, stalled investment, and even stifled innovation.How have you had to adjust your forecasts today [Thursday 10 April]?Shawn DuBravac: I revised our forecasts this morning to take into account what the world would look like if the 90-day pause holds into the future and the 125 percent tariffs on China also hold. If you look at smartphones, it would be close to a 91 percent impact. But if all the tariffs are put back in place as they were specified on “Liberation Day,” then that would be 101 percent price impact. The estimates become highly dependent on how influential China is for final assembly. So, if you look instead at something like TVs, 76 percent of televisions that are imported into the United States are coming from Mexico, where there has long been strong TV manufacturing because there were already tariffs in place on smart flat-panel televisions. The price impact I see for TVs is somewhere between 12 and 18 percent, as opposed to a near doubling for smartphones. Video-game consoles are another story. In 2024, 86 percent of video-game consoles were coming into the United States from China. So the tariffs have a...