China announced that it will reduce import tariffs on several U.S. commodities, including certain kinds of technology. This is a sign of easing tensions between the United States and China on its devastating trade-war waged between 2017-19 that wiped billions of Dollars of value from the capital markets and saw increases in prices of goods around the world. The exhaustive list of 859 commodities covers raw materials for a variety of polymers and plastics found in consumer durables, raw materials for energy storage devices, certain kinds of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, photo and video imaging equipment (camera components), LCD and OLED display components. There are hundreds of other commodities from other industries, covering food, industrial automation, and agriculture.

The items on China's updated import tariffs list amounts to some USD $389 billion in annual trade, or about 18 percent of China's annual imports. The cuts in import tariffs are expected to not just benefit U.S. exporters to China, but also stimulate similar import tariff cuts from the U.S. in response. China has an insatiable appetite for camera equipment, and has eased imports of OLED and certain semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which could have a trickle-down effect on the tech industry. Find the complete schedule of goods with updated import tariffs here. We've machine translated relevant pages in the screenshots below.

The US Trade Representative on Friday granted a reprieve to the increased tariffs being levied at China-imported electronic goods. The exemption, valid for one year until 20th August 2020, includes some products that will be welcome to PC hardware enthusiasts, including motherboards, graphics cards, desktop cases, "mouse input devices" valued over $70, "trackpad input units" valued at over $100, and power supply units that output more than 500 W.

The exempts have come as fruits of requests from US stakeholders in the hardware space; should imports be available only from China (meaning there are no alternate sources of said materials) or if the tariff could cause "severe economic harm", a temporary reprieve on the levies could be sought. And so the exempts were requested, and now granted. Prices paid before the announcement of the reprieve that included the added tax penalties are final; the exemption is only valid for orders after September 20th. This means the 25% increased rates (itself an increase on the initial 10%) on the tax basis are now frozen when it comes to the aforementioned hardware. This means companies no longer have to scramble to source their manufacturing to countries other than China, and that prices increased for end consumers on the basis of the tax increase are now meritless.