TECHNOLOGY SUPPLIERS BRACE FOR TARIFFS

Donald Trump’s threatened Liberation Day tariffs, set to be imposed today, could ultimately impact pricing of printing equipment coming into Australia.

The world's offset and digital press manufacturers are bracing for tariffs on their exports to the US, which could significantly dampen demand there, and affect the costings of their overall operations.

The US is a key market for the German and Japanese offset press manufacturers. North America, of which the vast majority of sales are to the US, represents about a quarter of the revenue for Heidelberg, and 30 per cent for Koenig & Bauer. Taking these numbers out of production would impact overheads.

In its annual report just published, Koenig & Bauer expressed concern over the issue, it said, “In principle higher tariffs could exert pressure on demand in the US market and thus pose a challenge to the entire industry. The extent to which this decline can be offset cannot be conclusively assessed at this stage.”

The US does not manufacture any offset presses, so the gain to the US government would be in taxes, rather than job creation, but dampened demand would likely depress that figure anyway.

Digital press developers such as Canon, Fujifilm, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, HP and Xeikon all have major markets in the US, and would also be impacted by tariffs, which could be as much as 25 per cent. Wide format printer manufacturers would also be affected to the same degree. The impact would be similar to that of offset presses, with reduced revenue sending the overhead cost per press manufactured higher for everyone else.

If the US imposed tariffs on a wide range of Australian goods and services exported to the US and reciprocal tariffs were imposed by Australia, printing equipment manufactured in the US and imported into Australia, including HP and Kodak continuous feed presses, and EFI wide format equipment, could end up costing more.