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(Yicai) Jan. 23 -- The home appliance industry, as well as other manufacturing industries, will not necessarily move their large-scale production activities to the United States despite potential new additional tariffs, according to an expert.
The goal of US President Donald Trump is to bring back manufacturing to the US by imposing additional import tariffs, an expert told Yicai. However, this move will likely increase the risk of inflation in the country.
The expert made the above remarks after news about Trump discussing additional 10 percent tariffs on Chinese imports from Feb. 1 started circulating online.
The US previously implemented additional 7.5 percent import tariffs on Chinese color televisions, Zhang Bing, research director at Omdia China, told Yicai. Therefore, if the US government raises the additional import tariffs to 10 percent, the gap between the new and old rates will not be large enough to change the supply chain model of Chinese color TV exports to the US, Zhang explained.
The cleaning appliance industry earlier expected that the US would impose additional 25 percent import tariffs on goods from China, so 10 percent would not result in severe consequences, according to a senior expert.
Trump’s final policy has not been outlined yet, so Chinese firms can only wait and foster technological innovations, prepare their global manufacturing layouts, improve their business resilience, and upgrade their supply chain flexibility to adapt to the upcoming policy changes, Wang Jianguo, vice president of Chinese home appliance behemoth Midea Group, told Yicai.
For example, Midea has 17 research and development centers and 22 major manufacturing bases overseas, leading vacuum cleaning firm KingClean Electric has factories in Vietnam and Thailand, and robot vacuum giant Roborock Technology owns a foundry in Vietnam.
Editor: Futura Costaglione