When Donald J. Trump repeatedly singled out the Japanese construction equipment maker Komatsu during his 2016 presidential campaign, employees at the company were taken aback.
He brought up the Tokyo-based maker of tractors, forklifts and bulldozers in interviews and during presidential debates — sometimes to make a point about the decline of U.S. manufacturing, and sometimes for no apparent reason. In one interview, Mr. Trump criticized the Affordable Care Act as being so expensive that it required people to “get hit by a Komatsu tractor” to meet the deductible.
At the time, Komatsu’s president brushed off the remarks, saying the company was grateful to Mr. Trump for helping to raise its global profile. After his improbable victory over Hillary Clinton, however, Komatsu took steps to ingratiate itself with the Trump White House.
In 2017, Komatsu spent about $2.8 billion to acquire an American company that made mining equipment. Since then, it has increased investments in North America, adding thousands of workers to its payroll and ramping up domestic production.
When Mr. Trump was campaigning again this year, Komatsu returned to his cross hairs. His criticism was the same: He said the company had an unfair advantage from a weak Japanese yen.
“Look at Komatsu and these tractor companies,” he said in a June interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “Nobody wants to buy our product because it’s too expensive.”
A return to a Trump presidency is expected to have major implications for companies that do significant trade with the United States. But for those that have already been a target of Mr. Trump’s hectoring and public spotlight, this week’s election has come with an extra jolt of déjà vu — a reminder of the chaos of having to react to barbs lobbed from Mr. Trump’s bully pulpit.
“It’s really risky because his ire can be random,” said Alicia García-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia Pacific region at the investment bank Natixis. “Companies know they can get caught in the crossfire.”
In Asia, which accounts for the majority of America’s trade deficit, executives and policymakers are scrambling to understand what the president-elect’s pledge of higher tariffs will mean for the region. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump called for blanket levies of up to 20 percent on all imports, while imported goods from China would be subject to tariffs of 60 percent or more.
In a research note, the Australian banking group ANZ said that it expected Trump 2.0 to phase in the new China tariffs over time but that 60 percent was unlikely. The note also laid out possible responses from Beijing such as scaling back imports of U.S. agriculture goods and restricting exports of critical materials like rare earth metals.
China’s foreign ministry declined to comment on Wednesday about “hypothetical” tariffs.
Mr. Trump has also denounced major Biden administration economic initiatives that encouraged Asian technology companies to invest in the United States.
South Korean firms, such as the battery makers LG Energy Solution and SK On, have plowed money into building facilities and adding suppliers in the United States since the Inflation Reduction Act was enacted in 2022. The law provides tax credits and incentives to companies investing in green industries in the United States. Mr. Trump has said he plans to repeal the law and rescind the unspent funds.
Similarly, the South Korean chip maker Samsung Electronics relied on $6.4 billion in subsidies to build U.S. semiconductor plants as part of the CHIPS and Science Act to reduce America’s reliance on chips produced in Asia. Its rival SK Hynix received $450 million in funding.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest chip maker, received $6.6 billion to build a factory in Arizona.
Mr. Trump said the subsidies for Taiwanese companies, like TSMC’s funding for the Arizona plant, were a bad idea, because Taiwan had already grown to dominate the chip industry at the expense of U.S. rivals.
“They took almost 100 percent of our chip industry,” Mr. Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek. “We should have never let that happen. Now we’re giving them billions of dollars to build new chips in our country.”
Mr. Trump has yet to comment publicly on recent reports that some TSMC chips have ended up in devices made by Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant that was put on a trade blacklist during the first Trump administration. TSMC, which makes most of the world’s advanced chips, said it had not supplied to Huawei since the restrictions went into place.
TSMC said its investment plan in the United States remains unchanged. Another Taiwanese company, GlobalWafers Corp., a maker of silicon used in chip production, said that it expected the subsidies offered under the CHIPS Act to continue and “run smoothly in the Trump administration.”
When it came to his dealings with India in his first term, Mr. Trump zeroed in on Harley-Davidson, the Milwaukee-based manufacturer of heavyweight motorcycles, as a symbol of what he saw as the country’s misuse of tariffs. Mr. Trump has called India, hailed by Republicans and Democrats as a crucial strategic partner in America’s competition with China, a “very big abuser” of tariffs.
But Harley-Davidson, a rip-roaring symbol of the American highway, became a fixation for Mr. Trump. In 2018 alone, he brought up the plight of Harley-Davidson in India at least three times. The sticker price of fully American-assembled bikes that the company sold in India were marked up because of tariffs as high as 100 percent.
“It’s unfair,” Mr. Trump told a group of American governors at the White House that year. “India is selling us a lot of motorbikes.”
Overall, the country exports more to the United States than it imports, leaving Americans with a $28 billion trade deficit. All motor vehicles and parts accounted for barely 4 percent of what India sold to the United States, most of which was in oil products, gems and gold.
Mr. Trump boasted that he had talked Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India into reducing the tariff to 50 percent, but he still wasn’t satisfied. “The prime minister, who I think is a fantastic man, called me the other day and said, ‘We are lowering it to 50 percent,’” Mr. Trump said. “Like they’re doing us a favor. That’s not a favor.”
But the lower tariffs had little effect on Harley-Davidson. The company was already avoiding levies by assembling midweight bikes at a plant near New Delhi, and it knew that its full-size motorcycles were a luxury and not well suited to Indian streets. It closed its plant in 2020.
Shortly after, Harley-Davidson announced a partnership with Hero MotoCorp, a local manufacturer. Hero makes a Harley-branded bike that is lighter and much cheaper than anything Harley sells in the United States.
Back in Tokyo, Komatsu has been contemplating how to respond to a second term for Mr. Trump. As it has for many Japanese manufacturers, a weak yen — trading near three-decade lows — has helped Komatsu’s bottom line when it sells goods abroad and brings those foreign earnings back to Japan. The company has posted two straight years of record profits.
Mr. Trump said he believed that the weak yen and Komatsu’s success were hurting rivals like Caterpillar, the U.S. industry leader in construction equipment. But Komatsu’s annual revenue is roughly one-third of Caterpillar’s, and the U.S. construction giant’s market value is eight times as great.
For its part, Komatsu sees the United States as an export hub and ships more out of the country than it imports. Half of its U.S. sales are from products made in America.
Hiroyuki Ogawa, the company’s president, said in a briefing last week that Komatsu would try to import parts for its sold-in-America equipment from countries including Indonesia, India and Thailand if Mr. Trump imposed substantial tariffs on China.
He is hoping that the company’s significant U.S. investments and bolstered manufacturing presence in America will not go unnoticed by Mr. Trump.
“In that sense,” Mr. Ogawa said, “we hope Komatsu will be recognized.”
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