Analysts share concerns about Apple and other U.S. companies over expected Trump trade negotiations with China

As Donald Trump is being sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, Investor’s Business Daily notes analysts are weighing in on the impact of future trade negotiations with China under the Trump Presidency. Of particular concern are iconic U.S. companies like Apple, Starbucks, General Motors and Nike as well as U.S. companies with a high percentage of Chinese revenue…Apple is in both of those categories with 22% of the previous fiscal year coming from China.

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Apple’s 22% of Chinese revenue accounts for $46.4B of sales and other tech companies have an even higher proportion of Chinese sales. Qualcomm comes in at 57% revenue from China and Broadcom (maker of Raspberry Pi’s components) at 55%. Intel comes in at 21% of total revenue coming from China. Even though Apple has a lower percentage of Chinese revenue than Qualcomm, the iPhone maker has the most at stake as far as total sales dollars coming from China (as well as most of their manufacturing and assembly).

For now, analysts with The Eurasia Group aren’t overly concerned about Trump pushing tariffs as a negotiation strategy, but they do expect him to take action to change how Chinese steel and aluminum is dumped in the U.S.

The Eurasia Group, which analyzes political risk for investors, wrote that it expects the Trump administration to “aggressively accelerate the pace of anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and other unilateral actions against specific Chinese imports, but they will not adopt across-the-board tariffs in order to maintain room for a negotiated solution.”

The main concern is how China might respond and try to prevent Trump from further action. Evan Medeiros and Michael Hirson of The Eurasia Group wrote:

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China is likely to “retaliate immediately and proportionally” with the goal of inflicting “substantial but not overwhelming pain on U.S. firms” to persuade Trump not to take broader, more destabilizing steps. Among the likely targets are “iconic American consumer goods” and companies in agriculture, aviation, financial services, tourism and technology.

Earlier this week Trump shared in an interview he believes Tim Cook has his ‘eyes open’ to U.S. assembled iPhones and would like to do ‘something major.’