(Credit: Joe Shields)
Motherboard vendor ASRock is responding to Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods by shifting manufacturing to other markets.
The White House this week imposed a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports to the US, which also applies to any existing import duties the US previously imposed on select Chinese goods.
In response, ASRock told PCMag in an email: "As for the 10% tariff applied to other products like GPU cards, we need some time to transfer the manufacturing to other countries."
Moving manufacturing out of China will enable ASRock to avoid the 10% tariff and future levies. Trump has repeatedly signaled he plans on using tariffs to pressure companies to bring their manufacturing to the US.
ASRock added that it plans to "work with manufacturers in Vietnam and Taiwan." But it can take time, possibly years, for a vendor to migrate their production to other markets. As a result, ASRock said, "In the transition period, we may absorb some of the cost and also increase some in price to reflect the increased cost."
But in some good news for consumers, the company said: “Since the market is still highly competitive, it is not easy to raise price.” In addition to motherboards, ASRock also sells desktop graphics cards, but only for Intel and AMD GPUs.
The comments offer some insight into how the PC market will react to the tariffs when PC parts production has long been based in China. In late 2021, Nvidia told US trade officials that earlier efforts to create new manufacturing capacity outside of China in countries such as the US and Vietnam had failed to take off, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But since then, others, such as Apple, have been investing more in manufacturing products in India, giving them a way to bypass US-China trade wars. "If you look at the manufacturing we do [in India], we do manufacturing both for the domestic market, and we export,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an earnings call last week.
As for ASRock, the company also indicated to PCMag that it already faces a 25% tariff for its power supplies made in China. “For the products already with extra tariff (25%) such as PSUs, manufacturers will continue the same process without change,” the vendor added.
We also reached out to Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus about how they’ll respond to new tariffs. We'll update the story if they respond.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with further comment from ASRock.