FRANKFURT, May 15 (Xinhua) -- At a plant located in the Western German town of Bretten, over ten robotic arms are working on a highly automated production line to assemble components into tire-pressure monitoring systems (TPMS), a key technology now standard in vehicles worldwide to monitor tire pressure.
On one side of the production line, stacks of boxes containing TPMS units produced by Huf Baolong Electronics Bretten GmbH (Huf Baolong) await shipment to customers. As a market leader in Germany's TPMS sector, Huf Baolong - a Sino-German joint venture - counts the United States as one of its main export markets. The company's export value of approximately 16.5 million U.S. dollars annually.
Amid a 25 percent tariff imposed by the U.S. administration on imported automobiles and auto parts, Huf Baolong, like many other German manufacturers, is working to mitigate the effects of the trade tensions.
In order to soften the direct impact of the tariffs, Huf Baolong has shifted its sales mode, the company's General Manager Arno Fuchs told Xinhua in a recent interview.
Fuchs explained that Huf Baolong primarily supplies its products to German car manufacturers, who then install the TPMS units in vehicles bound for the U.S. market. In such cases, it is German carmakers who bear the tariff burden. However, since the United States imposed its tariffs, the company now sells around 30 percent of its U.S.-bound exports directly to American customers.
A price increase may be inevitable, said Fuchs, describing the change as "an extraordinary cost increase." "We cannot make something else cover this," he added.
To navigate the potential impact of the tariffs, Huf Baolong has set up a task force to coordinate regularly with its customers. The additional U.S. tariffs mean increased costs for manufacturers, he noted, emphasizing that "the end customer pays the bill."
The company is currently evaluating different scenarios based on customer types to determine how much of the added cost it can absorb internally.
"Nobody's amused about that," Fuchs said, "but you have to cope with it." ■
