” It's a big hit” British firms react to Trump tariffs

American President Donald Trump has discovered a list of tariffs for countries worldwide that send their products to America.

The United Kingdom will undergo 10% tariffs for imports from Great Britain and 20% for European Union imports.

BBC Farms exporting to the US from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland for what they think will be the impact on their businesses, reports the report.

For Scottish whiskey producers, the U.S. is its most important market abroad worth 971 million pounds a year.

Anthony Wills runs the Kilchoman Desert on the island of Islay and says he feels like “exhausted” in the prospect of tariffs. “It's a big blow to industry,” he says.

For us personally, it represents 10% of our sales. So it is clear that there will be a big blow, especially with the current economic winds we're all experiencing, we will all see this very difficult and very challenging. ”

Industry has been hit before with US tariffs, with a 25% tax on the only mountains in 2019. The Scotch Association estimates that for the 18 months the tariffs were in place, the industry lost 600 million pounds in sales.

Mr. Wills says he shared the cost of the fee with his American importer so that the price would stand the same for their American clients.

I imagine we'll do what we did last time and try to keep the shelf price as it was before, he says.

We have to react and discuss this with our importer and decide what the best way forward is. ”

Barkley Plastics in Sutton Coldfield supplies parts to car producers, including Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan, Toyota and Mini.

Managing Director Matt Harwood says: “The new tariffs will influence a lot [car producers], which in turn affects businesses like us in their supply chain. ”

He says the United Kingdom automobile industry was already under pressure before tariffs were declared. The UK produced more than 1.5 million cars a year before the pandemic -- this has now dropped to 800,000 annually.

Mr. Harwood says: “Cavid-19, the lack of chips and the wider disruptions of the supply chain have made volumes unpredictable in recent years. These new American tariffs threaten to push that number further down, which would be particularly harmful to smaller suppliers like us who operate with narrow margins.

A further drop in demand could quickly translate into job losses or even business closures,” he says. So our main concern is how US tariffs endanger tens of thousands of jobs within the supply chain of automobiles in the United Kingdom. ”