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How Trump’s Tariffs Might Help Amazon — and Hurt Its Customers

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America’s top tech stocks plunged after Donald Trump’s tariff announcements, with the so-called Magnificent 7 — Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Tesla — losing more than a trillion dollars in collective value the next day and continuing their bleeding on Friday.

The president’s rambling “Liberation Day” proclamation contained different versions of the same bad news for each firm. Apple manufactures a lot of devices in China but has spent billions of dollars hedging with new factories in Vietnam, India, and Malaysia. Now, all of them are subject to massive new tariffs. (One analysis estimated iPhone price increases at “30 percent to 40 percent.”) In addition to Elon Musk’s co-dependent relationship with the Trump administration, around 20 percent of Tesla’s revenue comes from China, as do many components of its cars sold elsewhere.

The sizes of the drops in shares of big tech companies varied in ways that made sense: Microsoft (down about 20 percent from its highs) is probably structurally less exposed than, for example, Nvidia (down 40 percent), which outsources chip manufacturing to Taiwan and is now clinging to a narrow (and negotiable) semiconductor exemption from generally astronomical tariffs. Meta and Google (both down around 30 percent) are valued as complex tech companies but make basically all their money from advertising, which fares particularly poorly during economic downturns, and which in recent years has been coming from China, where their services are otherwise banned.

Some of the biggest spenders on........

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