What Walmart and 13 other companies have said about Trump's tariffs

Walmart (WMT) CEO Doug McMillon is confident that the big-box retailer can navigate Trump’s tariffs, although the company will likely feel some pressure.

“Tariffs are something we’ve managed for many years, and we’ll just continue to manage that,” McMillon said on a recent earnings call. “We can’t predict what will happen in the future, but we can manage it really well.”

And we’re wired to try and save people money. So that will be our ultimate goal,” he added, according to a transcript.

The company sources about two-thirds of its products from the U.S., which will help it avoid some of the pain competitors like Amazon (AMZN) will likely face. However, CFO John David Rainey doesn’t expect the company to be “completely immune” from the duties.

Rainey told CNBC that Walmart has a few ways to mitigate the effect of tariffs, including shifting supply “where necessary to try to take advantage of lower costs that we can then pass on to consumers.”

The automotive industry is expected to be hit very hard by the U.S.’ tariffs on Mexico and Canada. Over about a century, automakers have developed roots in both countries, purchasing from Mexican and Canadian suppliers and operating local factories.

“Let’s be real honest: Long term, a 25% tariff across the Mexico and Canada borders would blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we’ve never seen,” Ford Motor Co. (F) CEO Jim Farley said at a recent investor conference. Just shy of 15% of Ford’s sales are sourced from Mexico, according to S&P Global Mobility data.

“Frankly, it gives free rein to South Korean, Japanese and European companies that are bringing 1.5 million to 2 million vehicles into the U.S. that wouldn’t be subject to those Mexican and Canadian tariffs,” he added.

General Motors (GM) CEO Mary Barra has said the automaker is poised to mitigate up to 50% of Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but the company is also entertaining the idea of moving production. Twenty-two percent of GM’s U.S. sales were sourced from Mexico.

“If they become permanent, then there’s a whole bunch of different things that you have to think about in terms of, where do you allocate plants, and do you move plants, etc.,” GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson said of U.S. tariffs at a recent Barclays conference.

On a Feb. 26 earnings call, Stellantis (STLA) said it has been supportive of Trump’s “America First” manufacturing policies, including tariffs. Board of Directors Chair John Elkann said Stellantis believes products made in Canada and Mexico that use U.S. parts should be tariff-free.

“We strongly believe that the real opportunity is really to try and close the loophole for 4 million cars that are sold in America that don’t have any US content,” Elkann said.

Pfizer (PFE) is vulnerable to Trump’s potential tariffs on imports from the European Union, which the president has said will likely be duties of 25%, according to the drug firm’s CEO.

“We are waiting to see how that could play out with the tariffs in places that have not been announced yet,” CEO Albert Bourla said at an industry conference on Feb. 18. “But so far China, Canada and Mexico are not affecting us.”

Merck’s (MRK) CFO Caroline Litchfield in early February said that the company expects “a very immaterial impact” from Trump’s tariffs. Litchfield noted that Merck has a manufacturing footprint that “really enables global supply” with low levels of manufacturing in China, Mexico, and Canada.

Although Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) hasn’t publicly discussed tariffs at length, the company said it would invest $27 billion in four new manufacturing sites in the U.S., creating 3,000 permanent jobs and almost 10,000 construction jobs. However, the investment may hinge on tax cuts.

“The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act legislation passed in 2017 during President Trump’s first term in office has been foundational to Lilly’s domestic manufacturing investments, and it is essential that these policies are extended this year,” CEO David Ricks said in a Feb. 26 statement.

“We need to see those [tax cuts] either extended or improved to support this,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

Best Buy (BBY) has been warning customers that the president’s tariffs may result in potential price hikes for months. The duties effect on its operations is set to increase on Tuesday.

CEO Corie Barry told MPR News in early February that about 60% of the company’s cost of sales flows through China “in some way, shape or form.” Trump has said his duties on Chinese imports will grow to 20% from 10% on Tuesday.

“We’ll work with vendor partners, but at the end of the day, these really do become costs that get passed on to the American consumer,” she said. “They flow through that entire supply chain, and they become part of the baseline cost.”

Barry noted that moving supply chains out of China, as Apple has attempted in recent years, is a lengthy and complex process. Moving production to the U.S. isn’t easy either.

“These aren’t supply chains that are easy to build here,” Barry said. “And in fact, many companies that have tried to build supply chains here in the U.S. have not been successful because they’re so complex, because of the quantities of labor and technical expertise that you need.”

HP (HPQ) CEO Enrique Lores told Bloomberg TV on Friday that the hardware maker is considering moving some of its manufacturing to the U.S.

That shift is one of the scenarios HP is considering, Lores said, but emphasized that the company has not made a decision yet. Making products at home would allow HP to respond more quickly to customer demand, but would likely take a lot of elbow grease.

“It is not only the assembly that we would be doing — it is what will it take to bring all of the different components and different suppliers we have and have them manufacture here?” Lores told Bloomberg TV. “This is going be a much longer process, and it is part of the evaluation that we are doing.”

HP said on Feb. 27 that its outlook for its second quarter would include adjusted earnings per share of 80 cents, less than analysts had expected. In a statement, the firm cited added costs driven by the U.S.’ tariffs on China.

However, HP also said it expects more than 90% of its products sold in North America will be built outside of China by the end of its 2025 fiscal year, which ends in October.

Acer CEO and chairman Jason Chen has said his laptops will likely cost an additional 10% in the U.S., directly pointing to Trump’s tariffs.

“We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” Chen told The Telegraph in mid-February. “We think 10pc probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.”

The CEO added that some companies will likely use the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices by more than necessary. Most of Taiwan-based Acer’s laptops are assembled in China. Assembly of its desktop computers was pushed outside of China after Trump levied tariffs on the nation during his first term

The CEO of E.l.f. Beauty (ELF) told CNBC he was “relieved” that Trump’s initial tariff on Chinese imports is only 10%.

″[It] seems like a weird thing to say, but we actually were somewhat relieved when it was only 10 points because at one time, the rhetoric was as high as 60% tariffs,” Tarang Amin said on Feb. 6, noting that the company would “see whether we need to” raise prices.

His company makes 80% of its cosmetic products in China, down from almost 100% when Trump levied 25% tariffs on China during his first term. E.l.f. raised prices on about a third of its items by $1 at the time. Tariffs on Chinese imports are set to be upped to 20% on Tuesday.

Both Mattel (MAT) and Hasbro (HAS) have said they may need to raise prices in the face of Trump’s tariffs on Mexico and China.

Mattel, the company behind toy lines like Barbie and Hot Wheels, produces about 40% of its toys in China, compared to the industry average of 80%, Mattel’s head of finance, Anthony DiSilvestro, said on an earnings call. Less than 10% of its toys are made in Mexico, with no exposure to Canada.

“Certainly against the tariff, we have a range of mitigating actions,” DiSilvestro said, according to a transcript. “We don’t want to necessarily disclose our playbook, but they are in response to the tariff, they do leverage the strength of our global supply chain and they also include potential price increases.”

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks told Yahoo! Finance on Feb. 20 that the company is ready to raise prices to offset pressure from new tariffs.

“When we look at the current kind of guidance that we’ve given, which factors in the 10% on China tariffs, pricing will be a variable that we play with, but I think it will be very targeted,” he said.

Hasbro, which already makes Magic the Gathering cards and board games in the U.S., wouldn’t be able to quickly reshore other production. “[B]ringing back manufacturing jobs to the US would require us to do very heavy automation, and it would be a pretty heavy lift and take multiple years,” Cocks said.

Chipotle’s CEO says the company will cover the cost of President Donald Trump’s coming tariffs and not pass higher prices onto consumers.

“We don’t think it’s fair to the consumer to pass those costs onto the consumer, because pricing becomes permanent,” Scott Boatwright told NBC Nightly News. “It is our intent as we sit here today to absorb those costs.”

However, Boatwright said that he couldn’t promise that would always be true.

“We are fortunate to have such an extraordinary economic model at Chipotle that we can withstand those types of inflationary pressures and not have to pass those costs off to the consumer,” Boatwright said. “Let’s hold pricing constant, because we don’t know if the tariffs are transitory, if they’re going to be permanent, how sticky they’ll be in the new administration.”

While the vast majority of avocados that Americans consume come from Mexico, Chipotle (CMG) only gets half its supply from the U.S.’s southern neighbor. The rest come from Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.

Besides guacamole, Chipotle gets almost none of its food products from China or Canada. Boatwright said he only expects costs to go up 0.6% because of tariffs.

—Ben Kesslen contributed to this report