U.S. President Donald Trump has launched an attack on Harley-Davidson for their plan to shift some of their motorcycle production abroad.
Harley-Davidson has issued a statement that they are set to lose around $100 million per year from the new taxes imposed by the European Union on motorcycles that the company would ship from America. The European Union has recently raised their tariff from 6% to 31% last week as a response to the tariffs set by the Trump administration on imports of aluminum and steel from Europe.
Trump had announced about his willingness to impose new tariffs on aluminum and steel, which used to account for close to four percent of total imports entering the U.S. market.
In response to this, the European Union said that they would impose tariffs in an attempt to retaliate, on American goods worth over $3.3 billion. It includes more than 200 kinds of products, with American items like Harley Davidson Motorcycles, Levi Strauss and Co jeans and bourbon. To this, Trump went on to tweet that tariffs would be raised on European cars, as part of retaliation against European Union’s retaliatory tariffs.
Tuesday morning saw a series of tweets, wherein Trump had said that Harley-Davidson is making the retaliation from the European front, as an excuse for shifting some of their production operations overseas. Harley workers’ top union went on to claim that the organization had planned to get some of their operations to shift to Thailand, way before the tariffs were even announced.
The company went on to acknowledge the fact that they have already been in the process of moving some of their production abroad. They have also gone on to say that getting more of their production shift overseas is only a kind of sustainable option in the wake of crisis due to the trade war.
People of America are buying fewer numbers of motorcycles; people outside the nation are buying more and Harley intends to build bikes so that it reaches out to their international customers.
