If you’re buying a digital billboard soon you might want to ask your digital billboard company what impact, if any, will occur from the imposition of the first round of Chinese tariffs.

LED’s, the building block for digital billboards, were on the list of items which faced a 25% import tariff effective July 6th.  Insider ran across an article saying that the American LED company Cree will face a tariff on products which it makes at its plant in China.

An unintended consequence of the tariffs is that they hurt some of the companies they are supposed to help.  The tariff applies to unbundled LED’s so a US company importing LED components to assemble them in the US at a US digital billboard plant creating US jobs will pay the tariff.  A company which imports an entire billboard manufactured overseas or LED’s assembled into other products overseas is not impacted by the tariff because it applies only to LED’s not, for instance to certain bundled products like TV screens.

The US digital billboard companies can also avoid the tariff by buying their LED’s from Japan or Malaysia rather than China.

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