Would this affect pricing on the to be announced products at the upcoming event?
Hard to know. @jcenters, @lymond, do you remember any questions about this in the last earnings call? That’s where topics like this generally come up.
I honestly don’t remember anything substantive about it.
But I believe there are online transcripts of the call. Cf. https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2018/07/31/apple-inc-aapl-q3-2018-earnings-conference-call-tr.aspx
In fact, Cook did talk a bit about tariffs, but was inconclusive about the proposed ones:
In terms of the tariffs that have been imposed or have exited the comet period, there’s one that’s exiting today. There have been three of those in – maybe I could walk through those briefly just to make sure everybody’s on the same page. The first was the US imposed a tariff on steel and aluminum that was many, many different countries that started at the beginning of June.
There’ve been two other tariffs that have totaled about $50 billion of goods from China that have either been implemented or exiting the comet period in this month. I think the latest one exits today. If you look at those three tariffs, none of our products were directly affected by the tariffs. There is a fourth tariff which includes goods valued at 200 billion, also focused on goods that are imported from China – that one is out for public comment, probably like everyone else we’re evaluating that one and we’ll be sharing our views of it with the administration and so forth before the comet period for that one is.
It’s actually a tedious process in going through it because you not only have to analyze the revenue products, which are a bit more straightforward to analyze, but you also have to analyze the purchases that you’re making through other companies that are not related to revenue, maybe they’re related to data centers and this sort of thing. And so, we’re going through that now and we’ll be sharing our results later on those and feeding back public comment. Of course, the risk associated with more of a macroeconomic issue, such as an economic slowdown in one or more countries, or currency fluctuations that are related to tariffs is very difficult to quantify. And we’re not even trying to quantify that, to be clear about it.