HP Hastens China Exit as Tariffs Kick a Hole in its Profits (theregister.com) 64
An anonymous reader shares a report: HP is close to ending production of North-America-bound products in China, after US tariffs kicked a hole in its quarterly profits. "A quarter ago, we shared that our goal was to have less than ten percent of the products in North America being shipped from China by September," HP president and CEO Enrique Lores told investors on the company's Q2 2025 earnings call. "We have accelerated that and we share that now almost no products will be coming from China sold in the US by June. It's a very significant acceleration of the plan that we have."
"We accelerated the shift of factories out from China into Southeast Asia, into Mexico to a certain extent in the US to mitigate the impact of the change," he added. Lores also revealed that HP has removed the US as a distribution hub for products sold in Canada or to Latin America. Doing so means HP doesn't have to pay tariffs.
"We accelerated the shift of factories out from China into Southeast Asia, into Mexico to a certain extent in the US to mitigate the impact of the change," he added. Lores also revealed that HP has removed the US as a distribution hub for products sold in Canada or to Latin America. Doing so means HP doesn't have to pay tariffs.
Please stop (Score:2, Insightful)
America can only get so great!
See the pattern? (Score:2)
"We accelerated the shift of factories out from China into Southeast Asia, into Mexico to a certain extent in the US to mitigate the impact of the change,"
Notice what their last choice is. Also note that the only thing they will stop making in China is stuff that they would sell in the U.S.
What do you think the odds are that the entire HP senior management votes straight Republican.
Re: See the pattern? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: See the pattern? (Score:4, Interesting)
"HP has removed the US as a distribution hub for products sold in Canada or to Latin America. Doing so means HP doesn't have to pay tariffs." Oh look, warehouse and logistics workers who are no longer required.
Came to say exactly this.
But won't all those workers get jobs in manufacturing? Won't companies revive those abandoned rust belt factories and re-shore all the heavy industry that fled to cheaper countries? /sarc
I say that sarcastically; but as I've said before, I suspect all this gutting of social support may be in aid of making the US into a third-world dictatorship where labour is cheap, the bottom 99% are poor and struggling, and the average lifespan is reduced by a decade or more. So maybe my sarcasm has a basis in reality.
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Apparently, there are a lot of jobs opening up to pick fruit and vegetables, maybe some slaughterhouse work
They'll set up square dance and 4-h programs for all
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Comparing US wages to India wages for manufacturing is just delusional
High tech workers in India make as much in a day as most US IT workers make in an hour, and manufacturing jobs pay waaaaaay less
This will ONLY make sense in America when you can live an $5 a day
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That only works if there is excess labor laying about and the tariffs are high enough to make manufacturing wages competitive with working at McDonalds (which IS a manufacturing job)
Most available labor is already soaked up in America
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working at McDonalds (which IS a manufacturing job)
Certainly. Go put together a tank, an XBox, a TV, a dining room table with a big mac. 0_0 I don't know what you're inhaling, but the fact is putting together a big mac is not a manufacturing job.
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Thats not how its gonna pan out.
The unemployment rate is around 4.2%. It can possibly go into the high 3%, but below that your mostly just dealing with folks with significant disabilities and illnesses making them unable to work, the elderly, and stay at home mothers. This is the "natural unemployment" base rate that you cant really eat into unless you get exceptionally obnoxious and start forcing people to work who really shouldnt be.
As a result, its mostly low-skilled low-pay jobs that have fled to cheape
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Those workers are still required. They're just required outside of the U.S.
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They're going to make the little velcro strap for laptop chargers in this country.
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They're going to make the little velcro strap for laptop chargers in this country.
Even more winning!
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They're going to make the little velcro strap for laptop chargers in this country.
Yep. Now remove your sarcasm and you'll get it.
HP (Score:5, Insightful)
This company fell off my radar over 15 years ago. I used to swear by HP printers until I started swearing at them. Total junk. Now I see you need to subscribe just to use them. Nope, nope, nope.
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Yep. HP printers used to be synonymous with tank as in "Sherman tank". Now they're synonomyous with tank as in "septic tank".
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Came to say the same - their printers have been a scam machine for decades. Their laptops are design to literally (and physically) fall appart - see any of the problems with their hinges, or generally any of their thermals. They make junk. It's not even cheap junk - it's just junk. I swore off HP ages ago, and will continue to avoid it for the rest of my time on this marble.
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The story here is that Trump's tariffs are destroying US businesses, and ceding ground to Chinese ones. Apple is taking a beating in China too.
Key question (Score:3, Insightful)
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The key question is 'how many well paid American jobs did this create' of course. I don't see the answers here.
By mostly shifting production to SE Asia? Not many...
I'm still waiting for my new US job spending long hours screwing in millions of tiny screws into an iPhone!
Re: Key question (Score:2)
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You are dreaming
Manufacturing has never been fun, and overtime has been pretty much destroyed by anti-union 12 hour day shifts that pay the same no matter how many days you work
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The six figure welding jobs that you are referring to are welding pipes in remote areas where you have to live in drug-filled man camps and use amphetamines to stay awake on the job
90% of welding jobs in the US pay about $20/hour, where you can work on a shop floor welding trailer frames.
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I'll take a job putting screws in a phone. Who cares? It's a job. It's not like your changing the world with your job either.
Come back when you're 50 years old and have poor eyesight from doing nothing but close-up work all day, arthritis in all your fingers, and constant back pain from hunching over a desk. Then you'll get fired because you can't do the work any more, and you'll find out how much drugs and health care cost without insurance.
Interesting way to prevent back pain [totalknifecare.com.au]: "Photo shows French knife grinders who worked on their stomachs in order to save their backs from being hunched all day. They were also encouraged to b
Re: Key question (Score:1)
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Some of us have jobs we don't fucking hate, and actually pay well. None of those people are going to agree with you, and screwing together iPhones is a MASSIVE step down.
I'm not taking a $100+k/year pay cut for "overtime" that won't measure up, and constant micromanagement of how I spend every minute of my day. And guess what? I don't have to deal with customers either.
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The key question is 'how many well paid American jobs did this create' of course. I don't see the answers here.
This is likely a net LOSS in US jobs from HP due to the tariffs.
Still jobs elsewhere (Score:3)
So the tariffs are only impacting China and not doing anything to bring jobs back to the US? Not sure whether thatâ(TM)s considered winning?
The jobs are never coming back (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also funny because when surveyed nobody really wants to work in a factory but everybody is desperate to get those factory jobs back. Like how nobody wants to go pick strawberries but we will be
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Like how nobody wants to go pick strawberries but we will be damned if we bring in migrants to do it.
There is a visa specifically for this (H-2A).
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Yes, and this government has already shown themselves more than happy to deport people here legally because they are playing stat games. ICE is being "graded" on how many people they deport, and upper management is getting fired for not making the numbers. So they're going after low hanging fruit and bullshit like deporting people trying to do it right, rather than the harder work of actually trying to find and deport people here illegally.
If you make the game about the stats, then the players are going t
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Nah, there will be a few dozen jobs watching the robots at any automated factory. They won't be skilled jobs, and they won't pay much. And there will be somebody sweeping up.
But people really DO want to work in factories. I know people who used to make t-shirt fabric, people who used to make bluejeans. They enjoyed their jobs, believe it or not. Those factories are closed now, shut down maybe a couple decades ago. The union (actually used to be ILGWU [youtube.com] before it was UNITE HERE!) even closed up shop her
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Question is would they have the same opinion about that service job if it paid more than the factory or would they work at the factory for less money than the service job.
To me that is the crux of this whole argument, the factory or no factory is 99/100 a spiritual argument and not an economic one, that working in a factory is "more fulfilling" in some way.
If wages for workers is the issue then lets just deal with that first. What manufacturing we need should be determined by other factors and subsidized a
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Not having to deal with the public is worth a pay cut.
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there will be a few dozen jobs watching the robots at any automated factory.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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And you are now expecting every factory to be the same as that example?
What happens when a product is much easier to automate the production of than an incredibly complex product like a car? Do you think that factory is still going to employ 11k people in shifts?
As it turns out, factories that make injection-molded plastic shit by the millions isn't going to need 11,000 workers.
No there won't (Score:2)
When you say a couple dozen that's a big number to the kind of person who voted for Trump because they thought factory jobs are coming back.
The only way to make folks understand it is to say it as it really is. Two guys watching the machines. And maybe a security guard or maybe not.
Those are the real numbers and those are numbers people understand.
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Nah, there will be a few dozen jobs watching the robots at any automated factory. They won't be skilled jobs, and they won't pay much. And there will be somebody sweeping up.
But people really DO want to work in factories. I know people who used to make t-shirt fabric, people who used to make bluejeans. They enjoyed their jobs, believe it or not. Those factories are closed now, shut down maybe a couple decades ago. The union (actually used to be ILGWU [youtube.com] before it was UNITE HERE!) even closed up shop here about a decade ago, the union hall is a pain clinic now.
But yeah, the people who used to make your Levi's didn't hate their jobs. They're not big fans of the service jobs they're working now for less money, though.
And consumers aren't willing to pay more money, unless its something niche. The problem maintaining a small outfit. unless there are ways to reduce maintenance fees?
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I hate it when you say shit like that, because I think you're right and the reality of the situation sucks.
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It's the American Dream. Every American is just a temporarily embarassed millionaire so they don't actually want a factory job, but they want lots of factory jobs for all the actual poor people and their future employees.
Meanwhile the US has some of the lower social mobility in the OECD.
There's also a lot of rosy retrospection bias. The US had a post WWII golden age that a lot of the people currently in power remember. It was growing fast, primarily because much of the rest of the world was in ruins and the
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A friend's of mine father worked 45 years manually screwing caps on bleach bottles all day long.
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Definitely some variety makes it better. Unfortunately that hurts efficiency so modern companies tend to think of factories and factory workers as mere machines.
You should try being a farm laborer instead. Then you can do up to 12 hours a day of physically-demanding activity, and get a lot more variety in the work. I'm half serious.
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I think the problem is you can't have nuance in america.
As a Brit living in America, I confirm that this is so true.
Whenever there is a problem or issue, there is a search for the single cause. No one ever seems to consider that the issue may be caused by a confluence of events.
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Um, no
There used to be a lot of fabric mills and clothing manufacturing in Massachusetts
They were Union jobs, and you could raise a family on those wages, with one working parent
Those jobs got destroyed by Republican, anti-Union, states creating "Right to Work" laws, which convinced manufacturers to move their operations to Southern US states
However, once those companies figured out they could easily relocate to reduce costs, they moved to Central and South America, abandoning those US workers
Eventually, th
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not even impacting China in a negative way... China got the benefit of the factory, trained personnel, and a logistics chain.... now they can use it to add additional capacity and manufacture competing products.
They've managed to make it a compounding negative for the US in the short, mid AND long term under the guise of "make america great again"
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Considering that a panel of federal judges unanimously shitcanned all this tariff nonsense as unconstitutional (by the way, one of the judges was appointed by Trump) through summary judgement, none of this is actually going to happen without some extreme legal gymnastics by SCOTUS. The appellate court in New York absolutely will not overturn or stay this judgement on appeal.
Once this shit gets resolved in the next few weeks, everything can go back to the way it was before an orange dipshit and his cronies
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Thursday May 29, 2025 @05:18PM (#65414919), MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) Displayed an amazing inability to predict the past.
The appellate court in New York absolutely will not overturn or stay this judgement on appeal.
As of 3:15 EDT:
A federal appeals court temporarily paused a ruling against President Donald Trump's global tariffs while weighing a longer lasting hold.
A brief order granting the stay was issued Thursday by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In its decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the government's request for an immediate administrative
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Yes, but here's the bit that a lot of media isn't commenting on: for an appeals court to issue a stay after a decision like this, the injuring (losing) party has to guarantee that there won't be further injury to the injured (winning) party.
In order to do that, the government told the appeals court that they would refund the tariffs to the paying business if the decision is upheld.
Think what that means for a second: prices are going up because of these stupid illegal tariffs, but the business will get the t
We were starting a cold war with China (Score:2)
This has nothing to do with the tariffs this has to do with the Cold war we're gearing up for because Russia has proven itself to be anything but a credible threat and the war on terror has run out of steam since it turns out it's relatively easy to stop people from flying airplanes in the buildings by just locking the cockpit.
Remember folks we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Will this decision be reversed? (Score:3)
Or at least, altered significantly, in light of last night's court decision [apnews.com] that declared the tariffs unconstitutional?
Yes, appeals to SCOTUS are inevitable, and the administration has other tactics to attempt to prop up the tariffs. But the point is that these tariffs are likely to disappear soon.
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SCOTUS is a joke. They have nothing to do with 'Justice'. They will do whatever their masters require of them. This shouldn't be necessary: Their masters are not the Public nor the Constitution, nor the concept of 'Justice'. (I do not actually know who their masters are, but I know who they are not)
May be moot (Score:3)
As of today, a Second court blocks Trump tariffs as 'unlawful' [go.com], noting that Congress, not the president, has the authority to impose tariffs under most circumstances, and Trump's tariffs do not meet the limited condition of an "unusual and extraordinary threat" that would allow him to act alone.
In an opinion on Wednesday, the three-judge panel struck down Trump's global tariffs as "contrary to law."
The judges found that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act -- which Trump used to enact his tariffs -- does not give him the "unlimited" power to levy tariffs like the president has in recent months.
"The President's assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration or scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under IEEPA. The Worldwide and Retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra vires and contrary to law," the judges wrote.
The Trump administration has filed an appeal, but they may have other avenues to explore as well. 2 laws Trump could use to reimpose his tariffs (and why he might use both) [yahoo.com]
The most prominent quick strike option is the so-called balance-of-payments authority derived from Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That power could allow Trump to move quickly, but with a 150-day limit on how long any tariffs can be in place.
The second route is a possible renewed focus on sectoral duties such as "Section 301" or "Section 232" tariffs.
These long-established tariff authorities (one derived from the Trade Act of 1974 and another from a separate Trade Expansion Act of 1962) are ones Trump has used in the past, but with the downside, from his perspective, that they can take time to implement.
imagine if they didn't move their factories (Score:1)
changing the location of a factory 5 times must have significant overhead. imagine the cost savings if they had just kept their factories in america. simply caring about america and keeping production here instead of trying to squeeze every cent out of a dollar by taking advantage of cheap foreign labor would've, in the end, probably produced significant cost savings. and the delta either way would've all gone to pay american wages, instead we've sent untold amounts to foreign countries.
i have such seething
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Because we all know that when you build a factory, you never have to do anything else with it, ever.
Nope, they would have had to spend that money anyway to upgrade the factory to make newer products. May as well send all the machines and tools to somewhere with cheaper cost of labor, which is what they did.
Weaponization (Score:2)
Xi has promised to retaliate as he see this as being worse than a nuclear option.