Data Dive: China Tariffs Could Hike Cost of Food, Luggage, Furniture, Clothing

The Trump administration’s 10% tariff on all goods shipped from China will be felt by Hawaiʻi businesses that import kitchen cabinets and wooden doors, sofas and lobster tanks, soy sauce and canned mushrooms, traffic cones and bulldozers.

Many Hawaiʻi businesses rely on “just in time” shipments to keep their inventory low, which means they could see the effects of those tariffs soon. But experts say it’s unclear how much of the added costs will be passed on to consumers. 

About 840 Hawaiʻi businesses received about 2,000 shipments from China between February 2022 and February 2025, according to maritime bills of lading. Those records, filed with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, list the origin of each shipment, the contents and where it’s headed.

The top 10 recipients took in 20% of the shipments over those three years. They include Hawaiʻi’s largest wholesalers of food, restaurant supplies, furniture, luggage and clothing accessories.

Shipments valued under $800 have long been exempt from import duties, but that trade rule will be suspended once a tariff mechanism is in place for imports from China, President Trump has said. That change, announced in the final days of the Biden administration, could result in higher prices at e-commerce sites such as Temu and Alibaba Express — unless they change how they operate to avoid the tariff.

The National Bureau of Economic Research found that eliminating the duty-free status of lower-priced imports from China such as clothing, toys and kitchen gadgets would disproportionately impact lower-income households. 

However, China falls well behind Taiwan as an exporter of goods to Hawaiʻi by weight, according to customs records.

China also isn’t the leading exporter by dollar value. South Korea is at the top, accounting for a third of the value of all imports — largely petroleum and motor vehicles.  

In 2023, the most recent data available, South Korean imports to Hawaiʻi were valued at $706 million, followed by Japan ($471 million) and China ($206 million). 

The Trump administration’s 25% tariff on foreign aluminum and steel, announced this week, isn’t likely to affect Hawaiʻi. During the first Trump term, Civil Beat reported that the state ranks last in the nation for steel and aluminum imports, according to an analysis of Census data by the Brookings Institution in 2018. 

Data Dives are Civil Beat’s quick takes on numbers and data sets with a Hawai‘i angle.