Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer
America’s top tech stocks plunged after Donald Trump’s tariff announcements, with the so-called Magnificent 7 — Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Tesla — losing more than a trillion dollars in collective value the next day and continuing their bleeding on Friday.
The president’s rambling “Liberation Day” proclamation contained different versions of the same bad news for each firm. Apple manufactures a lot of devices in China but has spent billions of dollars hedging with new factories in Vietnam, India, and Malaysia. Now, all of them are subject to massive new tariffs. (One analysis estimated iPhone price increases at “30 percent to 40 percent.”) In addition to Elon Musk’s co-dependent relationship with the Trump administration, around 20 percent of Tesla’s revenue comes from China, as do many components of its cars sold elsewhere.
The sizes of the drops in shares of big tech companies varied in ways that made sense: Microsoft (down about 20 percent from its highs) is probably structurally less exposed than, for example, Nvidia (down 40 percent), which outsources chip manufacturing to Taiwan and is now clinging to a narrow (and negotiable) semiconductor exemption from generally astronomical tariffs. Meta and Google (both down around 30 percent) are valued as complex tech companies but make basically all their money from advertising, which fares particularly poorly during economic downturns, and which in recent years has been coming from China, where their services are otherwise banned.
Some of the biggest spenders on Google and Meta ads are Shein and Temu, which are subject to the top-line tariffs on imported goods but also benefited from the de minimis exemption, which allowed them to ship cheap goods to American customers directly while bypassing scrutiny by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and avoiding tariffs. On Wednesday, Trump announced he was ending that policy, again.
Which brings us to Amazon. The retail giant lost nearly a tenth of its value on Thursday alone (and is down 28 percent overall). With the substantial caveats that these tariffs could be repealed or changed as quickly as they were instituted, that Amazon’s last-minute bid for TikTok could involve or implicate it in some sort of broader negotiation with China, and that China might react in ways that further complicate Amazon’s situation, there are two obvious ways to understand how these new rules could matter to Amazon. One is narrow: By eliminating de minimis shipments, which created a shipping and tariff situation so favorable to companies like Shein and Temu that Amazon cloned them, the administration is taking pressure off the company, and probably bringing prices on the platforms like Temu and Shein (which are substantially selling the exact same ultracheap stuff these days) in line with each other. For their part, the Chinese e-commerce companies seem to have known this was coming — Trump tried it in February, before backing off — and have been refocusing their efforts on other markets for a while now, especially Europe.
The second effect is broader: Amazon’s business is massively dependent on relationships with Chinese businesses, in one form or another. As is the case with many American retailers, a massive portion of its products are manufactured there, of course. Unlike most retailers, a majority of its products are also sold by third-party merchants on the platform, and the majority of those sales come from sellers based in China. In the last few years, says tech and e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas, Amazon has “only accelerated its dependence on China. It has massive training centers for sellers in China, it organizes conferences for sellers. Any tariffs on China obviously have a massive impact on everything Amazon sells.” Without much “headroom” to absorb these tariffs, Amazon prices could go up across the board.
This is obviously bad news for any retailer, and painful for its customers. In the longer term, though — again, assuming this is a long-term situation — this could further entrench Amazon without substantially affecting its relationship with China.
More than a decade of aggressively pursuing cross-border commerce has transformed Amazon into a largely brandless store full of discount goods, which were often cheaper than their similarly imported, but branded, alternatives sold elsewhere. A situation in which prices are driven up for Amazon spatulas is a situation in which prices are driven up for most other spatulas people might buy instead. Cheap spatula production isn’t likely to be re-shored to the U.S. anytime soon, if ever. So everyone’s prices will be higher, but Amazon’s will be relatively low, and its lower-end major competitors will have been neutralized, leading customers back to Amazon, where shipping is faster and they probably already subscribe to Prime anyway. “During recessions, customers go for a cheaper alternative, Kaziukėnas says. “Amazon equally benefits from situations like this.” If, say, discretionary spending falls in general, that’s a challenge for Amazon, but perhaps less than many of its peers. Even setting aside its profitable cloud business and other ventures, Amazon’s retail business is diversified in ways that could mitigate tariffs. Its mostly internal advertising business, for example, squeezes fees out of sellers even when they fail, and while Chinese sellers account for much of that spending now, it’s an extremely profitable, high-margin business even if it shrinks (comparable businesses at Walmart are growing but relatively minuscule).
If Amazon benefits from Trump’s new trade rules, at least in relative terms, who loses? Direct-from-China e-commerce companies that have spent billions trying to lure American customers in a bid to ultimately take on Amazon more directly are obviously at risk, but so is basically everyone else. Small retailers selling more premium branded — but still likely imported — products will struggle. Other discount retailers, despite their dependence on imported goods, will both benefit from budget-conscious shoppers and find themselves competing more directly with the Everything Store. (Again, even in an environment where Chinese goods are subject to a 54 percent tariff, Marshalls and Ross are still cheaper than Target, and none of them is filling its shelves with made-in-the-USA goods anytime soon, which would likely still end up being far more expensive anyway.)
The biggest loser is shoppers. Prices will go up across the board with, in many cases, nothing to show for it in the purchased goods themselves. The country’s dominant e-commerce firm will tighten its grip on retail. People will still be buying Temu-tier Haushof or XiaoZu spatulas on Amazon. They’ll just cost as much as OXOs do. Or rather, did.
