Fixing the US’s $760 billion trade deficit with Asia was a key priority when President Donald Trump unveiled sweeping global tariffs on April 2, 2025. Declaring a national emergency on ‘Liberation Day,’ he promised to bring back manufacturing to America and reduce the country’s reliance on China.”
“[…] findings showed that the core production of those electronics is still happening in China. Faced with unpredictable tariffs, Chinese manufacturers found a cost-effective workaround: moving low-skilled, final assembly lines across the border to Vietnam, where they have faced lower levies. Vietnamese factories that screw together Chinese-made components and ship them onward added less than 8% of the export value in some cases, the Bloomberg analysis showed.”
“Although China’s shipments to the world’s biggest economy fell by $51 billion last year, that was more or less offset by the US’s cumulative $49 billion rise in imports from a group of countries including Vietnam, India and Mexico, according to the data. The data also shows the US still bought $130 billion worth of seven big-ticket electronics from overseas last year, falling just over 1% compared with 2024.”
“Bloomberg analysis of 2025 data found Fukang Technology Co., a subsidiary of Foxconn, exported $8.6 billion worth of MacBooks, iPads and motherboards for both products and servers, while importing $7.9 billion of various components from China, South Korea and Taiwan. That means at most 7.8% of the export value was created in Vietnam, if all final products at Fukang were exported.”