US companies’ caution higher tariffs may hit manufacturing push

New Delhi: Top companies, including American giants, have cautioned USTR that its move to impose additional tariff of up to 12.5% on 60 countries, including India, will push up costs for consumers and businesses, with several of them seeking exemptions for specific products.“The practical effect would be to make it more expensive to build in America than to build elsewhere, which runs directly counter to the administration’s goal of expanding domestic manufacturing,” Intel said in its submission. IBM, Dow Chemicals Thailand and GE Appliances, which is now a Haier company, also argued against the move.“Dell wants to express the importance of leveraging policy tools that achieve the administration’s laudable goals without rapidly increasing production and end-user costs or risking operational delays of key products and components,” Dell Technologies cautioned.Pointing to its reliance on imports for critical minerals, rare earths, scarce metals, and metal-containing aerospace inputs, and “other hard-to-source components”, including electronics, chips, displays, and specialised commercial components, Honeywell Aerospace said: “…a tariff would primarily increase the cost of maintaining and producing aerospace products rather than accelerate a feasible sourcing transition.”Given the US dependence on imports, De Beers said: “…additional duties on natural diamonds would function primarily as a cost increase for US manufacturers, retailers, and consumers rather than encouraging domestic upstream substitution.”Ford said it backed exemption for the four product categories already facing up to 50% tariff under Section 232, arguing that additional section 301 tariffs would impose “excessive and overly burdensome costs on US auto manufacturing without contributing substantially to the elimination of practices related to forced labour”.